Baltimoreans keep saying the darnedest things!

SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 2013

Ben Carson talks of the animals: Ben Carson did it again this week. In this morning’s Washington Post, his apology is reported by the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik:

ZURAWIK (3/30/13): Hopkins surgeon Ben Carson apologizes for ‘choice of words’ on gay marriage

Benjamin Carson, the famed Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, apologized Friday for his “choice of words” and use of examples in discussing gay marriage on Fox News earlier in the week.

During Sean Hannity’s show Tuesday, when asked about the matter before the Supreme Court, Carson said: “Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition.”

The comparison of gays to members of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and those who engage in bestiality set off a backlash of criticism in the media, online and on campus.

There he went again! In his use of NAMBLA and bestiality as points of comparison, Carson was repeating one of the dumbest talking-points from the whole talk radio/Fox News empire.

Carson is a famous neurosurgeon—but when it comes to political speech, he’s one of the dumbest people on earth. He doesn’t just repeat talking-points. He repeats the dumbest available!

As Carson continued speaking with Zurawik, he continued to display his overt political dumbness:

ZURAWIK: “I think people have completely taken the wrong meaning out of what I was saying,” the 61-year-old surgeon said in a telephone interview Friday. “First of all, I certainly believe gay people should have all the rights that anybody else has.”

He added, “Now, perhaps, the examples were not the best choice of words, and I certainly apologize if I offended anyone.”

Carson said: “But the point that I was making was that no group of individuals, whoever they are, whatever their belief systems, gets to change traditional definitions.”

In our view, the whole “definition of marriage” framework is pretty dumb in itself, though mainstream figures also employ it. But it seems that Carson had no idea how people would react to his choice of examples.

That makes him very dumb when it comes to American politics.

We’ll say again what we’ve said before. These episodes suggest a fascinating fact about the past role of gatekeepers:

For decades, Walter and David and other elites screened the things we the people heard in the political realm. There were crazy ideas abroad in the land, but you had to work hard to hear them.

Today, the gatekeepers are largely gone—and there are giant corporate entities devoted to spreading crazy ideas. They are spreading their crazy ideas all day long, all week.

We liberals like to criticize such entities on the right. But we are now actively developing Our Own Very Dumb Ideas.

Here’s the interesting part:

Presumably, Carson is very bright in the simple IQ sense. But even people with high IQs can’t separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to political speech.

Walter and David no longer keep Ben from hearing all those crazy ideas. And uh-oh! Left on his own, it’s fairly clear that Ben can’t see that these ideas are crazy.

For decades, we were protected from crazy ideas. Now, we’re out there on our own, and our powers of discernment seem to be quite weak.

Today's philosophical question: When women won the right to vote, did that "change the definition of voting?"

Debate and discuss, with reference to things you hear people saying on Fox.