A couple of days ago, as the debate over the Obama administration’s plan to relocate 10,000 Syrian migrants in the US began to heat up in earnest, GOP Presidential hopeful and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson released the following campaign video in which he amusingly said that Obama deserved to have his “breakfast defunded”:
Yes, "courage" is what is needed, and Ben Carson has a lot of it.
For instance, just yesterday Carson had the "courage" to stand up in front of a group of supporters at a campaign event in Alabama and compare the government effort to protect Americans from Syrian terrorists to parents protecting their children from "rabid dogs".
To be sure, it wasn't so much the comparison of ISIS to rabid dogs that piqued the media's interest but rather the fact that Carson didn't seem to realize that by likening radicalized Syrians to rabid dogs he was implicity calling all Syrians stray animals. Here's the quote:
"If there's a rabid dog running around in your neighborhood, you're probably not going to assume something good about that dog. And you're probably going to put your children out of the way. That doesn't mean that you hate all dogs. But you're going to put your intellect into motion and you're thinking, 'How do I protect my children at the same time? ... At the same time, I love dogs but I'm going to call the humane society and hopefully they can come and take this dog away."
Who knows where Ben was going with that, but we suppose the point was to say that just because the US doesn't want Syria's "rabid dogs" doesn't mean America hates all Syrian "strays". In fact, as you'll learn if you watch the clip, Carson "loves dogs"- it's just that sometimes he has to call the "humane society" to protect his children.
Anyway, this comes just days after Donald Trump said he wouldn't rule out [3] the possibility of putting all Muslim Americans in a special database and requiring them to carry ID cards. You'll also recall that Carson previously suggested [4] (on air) that no Muslim should be allowed to be President.
Remember, these are the two GOP frontrunners.
We'll simply close by asking the same question we put to readers on Thursday: are Carson and Trump right or is this a dangerous descent into scapegoating xenophobia?
