Vincent J. Curtis
23 Sept 15
Dr. Ben Carson, candidate for the Republican nomination in
the 2016 U.S. presidential race, was attacked this week for remarks he made on the
Sunday news show Meet the Press, in
which he said that he could not support a Muslim for president of the United
States.
He explained that a true Muslim has to adhere to Sharia law,
which is incompatible with American values and with the Bill of Rights; and
that in Islam there is no distinction between state and religion. Thus a true Muslim would, with all the powers
of the presidency available to him, be obligated by his faith to change the
United States into a theocracy upholding Islamic values, not the
Judeo-Christian and republican values expressed in the Constitution.
He later qualified his remarks by saying that it is the
creation of a theocracy that he opposes, and that if a Christian were to try
make the United States into a theocracy, he would oppose that person also. This was the concern of conservative
Baptists, among others, pertaining to the 1960 candidacy of John F. Kennedy,
who was a Catholic. The fear was that a
Catholic president would be taking his policy advice from the Pope. Kennedy publicly vowed before a conference of
Protestant pastors that as an American and as a free man he would run his
presidency as every one of his predecessors had. This ended the opposition to Kennedy as a
Catholic and he won the 1960 election over Vice President Richard Nixon, who
was a Quaker.
Even the conservative media found on Fox News were clucking
over Carson’s amateur mistake of falling for the obvious “gotcha” question of Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. While the media did go so far as to say that
this response demonstrated his unfitness for the office, the implication was
that Carson had to up his media game for him to deserve to be president. The conservative defense of Carson was that
similar gotcha questions would not be put to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama,
or to any Democratic nominee since the media act as the Praetorian Guard for
Democrat politicians they like.
Carson has not been attacked as severely as Donald Trump was
over the latter’s failure to correct a questioner concerning Barack Obama’s
religion. This sparing of Carson is due
to Carson’s record of high moral integrity and terrific life story. There is also a great chance that an attack
could prove invidious, since Dr. Carson is the only Black American in the
presidential race, has a quiet, polite manner, is dangerously intelligent and is
quicker on his feet than practically anyone in the media. In effect, Chuck Todd was lucky to have
stopped where he did.
The limited, practically incestuous opinions of the media
are quite in evidence in the race for the Republican presidential
nomination. The phenomenon of the Trump
candidacy have stumped the pundits. For
the pundits and for many professional politicians, Trump is beyond the
pale. His success is inexplicable to
them. But Trump’s present success says
more about the media’s pale than it does about Trump. Trump is a real person who says what he
thinks and who defends himself strongly.
Most importantly, he can’t be destroyed by a media campaign because of
his great wealth and the fact that that wealth cannot be imperilled by a small
group of vicious people. What
conservatives and Tea-Party types like about Trump is that he goes after the
right people with hammer and tong relentlessly, and his is fearless; he makes
no apologies. The fact that he is
entertaining also helps his cause.
In the case of Carson, the media have been afraid to attack
his apparent weaknesses because (a) he did not appear to be a serious
candidate; (b) his terrific life story; and (c) his gentle manner might redound
against the first media-type to attack him.
They would all have to rush after him at once, for attacking
individually they could be endangered themselves. The seeming put-down of a Muslim as president
presented the media with an opportunity to attack him all at once.
The media seem oblivious to the acquisition of knowledge of
the American public since 9/11 concerning Islam. The public is aware of ISIS, and the fact
that it is installing the purest expression of Islam into a new Caliphate. The outrages of Sharia law are generally
known. The evil practices in Islamic
countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and
Libya are generally known. Thus when
Carson says that he would not support a person as president who believes in
that, and that Islam with its Sharia law runs contrary to the Judeo-Christian
values of the U.S. Constitution, he says something that seems sensible to a
large segment of the Republican Party.
It is the media that appear maddeningly out of touch when they rave on
about religious tests and prejudice when they attack Carson over his “Muslim”
remarks and are scrupulously polite on matters Muslim.
Last night on The
Kelly File host Megyn Kelly tried to trip up Carson and, due to time, was saved
from having her head handed to her. She
took Carson through his explanation, and in the course of it he said that a
true Muslim has to believe in Sharia law.
If a Muslim said that he would adopt American values and would place the
Constitution above Islam, then he would become an infidel and heretic so far as
Islam was concerned but in becoming so, Carson could support him as President. Kelly then threw the name of a frequent guest
on her show who says he is a liberal Muslim.
At that point, time saved Kelly.
Had Carson time to respond, he would have said that the very
things that make her guest a liberal Muslim make him in the eyes of the
authoritative Muslim world a heretic and an infidel. If he were to say in the Muslim world the
things he says from the safety of American soil about how Islam has to
liberalize, he would be killed. So,
despite his protestations of being a Muslim, he can get away with qualifying
himself as liberal because there is no authority in Islam to say what the
religion is, unlike in the Roman Catholic Church which has a Pope and a written
doctrine. There is no Pope in Islam who
can excommunicate a person. In Islam,
there is no excommunication; there is only death for apostasy.
Carson hit on something that this columnist has remarked
upon for a while: that Islam and Sharia Law are incompatible with the
Judeo-Christian values contained in the U.S. Bill of Rights and other
Amendments, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. By now, one would think that the smart folks
in the media would have come to realize this.
A large swath of the American public have come to realize this.
Because the public outside of Washington, D.C. see things
and know things of which the media are unaware or are purblind to, the
candidacies of Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson do not sink when they are
attacked. It is the candidacy of
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker that sinks instead, in part because such
candidates are so nice and solicitous that butter wouldn’t melt in their
mouths. The Republican base are as sick
of the media as they are of the surrender monkeys on Capitol Hill. They want someone who fights as hard as
Barack Obama, who won’t back down or apologize, and who fearlessly speaks what’s
on their minds. For what is on their minds are also on the minds of a large number of Americans.
Right now, that limits the field to Trump, Carson, and
Fiorina. Rubio and Cruz are looking in,
but still have an air of political accommodation to them. The rest of the Republican field are old-time
politicians that the base are tired of.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment