But other than that, A+++ work, Kyle Cheney and Politico. The only African-American in the Republican 2016 class, Carson grew up in inner-city Detroit and often speaks about his brushes with violence and poverty during his early years.
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Conservative Christian darling and GOP presidential front runner Ben Carson is caught lying about receiving a full scholarship to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC supervisors”, his campaign manager told Politico.
Presidential candidate Ben Carson speaks at the Republican debate held by CNBC in Boulder, Colo., last month. He never said explicitly that he’d been accepted, or even that he’d applied.
“I think it’s pathetic and basically what the media does is they try to get you distracted with all of this stuff so that you don’t talk about the things that are important”, Carson said. Carson’s camp said it was a similar scenario as West Point: He had chose to apply elsewhere, and never submitted an application.
Carson called the CNN story a “smear campaign” and said questions about his past are a “bunch of lies”.
With the story snowballing, Carson went into damage control mode. That report was hotly contested and Politico ultimately amended it, later adding an editor’s note.
Carson would have needed to seek admission in order to receive an offer of free education from West Point. And he is now lashing out at the media for questioning his claims.
Carson had previously said he’d been offered a spot at the US Military Academy at West Point after meeting Gen. William Westmoreland as a 17-year-old in 1969. West point says they can’t confirm or deny whether he was ever told that, but they did say, the admissions process is a multistep process. To concede is to admit that something is true.
The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, who immediately expressed skepticism about the significance of the Politico hit that was taking everybody by storm, has a balanced take on the kerfuffle here.
CNN’s story looked into claims made in Carson’s memoir, “Gifted Hands”, of being a violent young teenager a few 50 years ago who attacked his mother and attempted to stab a friend. Or, as Politico put it: “indeed there are no ‘full scholarships, ‘ per se”. Furthermore, there are no “full scholarships” to the academy.
“This is a bunch of lies, that is what it is”, Carson told Alisyn Camerota when she asked about the report by Scott Glover and Maeve Reston in which they spoke to people Carson grew up with. “There was no application process [at West Point]”.
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He tells it in the context of his rapid rise through high school ROTC, which ended with him as the top-ranking cadet in Detroit.
