The NY Times is standing by its reporting on 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson’s supposed struggles with foreign policy, despite pushback from the retired neurosurgeon’s campaign. Terry Giles, a longtime friend of the candidate and his former campaign chairman, said he was “shocked” by the Times piece because “I have always found [Carson] to be incredibly intelligent, to have the equivalent of a photographic memory”. Whereas Jeb Bush can call on dozens of experts from the foreign policy establishment who once worked for the administrations of his father and brother, Carson so far has only one paid national security adviser, Robert F. Dees, a retired Army general on the staff of Liberty University, the institution founded by Jerry Falwell.
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One of the issues that’s been raised on the campaign trail has been Ben Carson’s lack of foreign policy experience, especially now when national security is at the forefront of people’s minds.
“For the NY Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices”, he said in a statement.
Style over substance, Dr. Carson. Daniel Drezner makes a careful, cautious case that Carson’s unpreparedness on foreign policy might actually hurt him. “I guess he just froze”. This wasn’t the usual “unnamed source” garbage the MSM loves to use when doing hatchet jobs on Republicans, it was directly quoting on of Carson’s top advisers.
Over the weekend, Carson appeared stumped when asked what countries the USA should align with in response to the terror attacks in Paris.
Carson has been under fire in recent weeks for a series of confusing answers on national security-related questions, including the time he said that China was involved in Syria militarily.
Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post noticed something amusing about this graphic, which Carson’s campaign used to declare opposition to Syrian refugees being allowed to be resettled in the United States.
“Dr Carson learns. He learns from 13 to 14 different people”, the adviser, Armstrong Williams, told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday. “He’s not flawless. He’ll never be ideal”.
In a “Fox News Sunday” interview, Carson was unable to name the foreign leader he would call first as he developed an ISIS strategy.
Update 5:04 p.m.: In an email to Business Insider, Carson campaign spokesman Doug Watts downplayed Clarridge’s influence on the campaign, arguing that he is not a “top adviser”, as The NY Times describes him. Yet it also raises questions about whether Carson can sustain that strong standing as he draws more scrutiny in a deep field.
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“Carson is transparent and authentic and he’s learning”, Williams said. Rohde managed to eventually escape from Taliban captivity, but according to a report from Gawker, someone who worked with him said “Clarridge was inflating his role in facilitating Rohde’s escape in an effort to justify AISC’s enormous fees”.
