Dr. Ben Carson stepped into the national spotlight recently when, as speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, to an audience that included President Obama, he was openly critical of the President’s approach to health care and his overall management of the nation’s economy.
Carson, who is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is a hero to many. His life story, rising from a Detroit ghetto to a life of accomplishment and distinction, is a story of American ideals on steroids.
Those ideals say that America is about merit not circumstance. Your life, your achievements are the result of what you do and how you live, not where you came from.
The hard history of blacks in America has always made it a challenge for them to accept this credo. Many still carry a sense that those ideals may be true for whites, but they never were true, and still aren’t true, for blacks.
So in this context, Ben Carson’s story is particularly important. It’s making liberals nervous, and the attacks on him are starting.
He’s now pulled out, under pressure, from giving the commencement address at Johns Hopkins University because some are unhappy with how, in an interview on Fox, he expressed his views regarding the importance of maintaining the integrity of traditional marriage.
Blacks have known about Carson for years. I gave his book Gifted Hands to my daughters to read when they were little girls. A highly acclaimed made-for-TV movie about his life aired in 2009, with Dr. Carson played by Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding, Jr.
But this story of personal responsibility, hard work and traditional values is becoming a political story. It is becoming political because Ben Carson’s American dream story, according to the liberal script, is not supposed to work for blacks.
Ben Carson is the biggest threat to liberals since Bill Cosby got out of line at an NAACP banquet in Washington, DC in 2004.
Cosby had the temerity to deliver tough, critical talk about what too many blacks are doing with the freedom that civil rights activists of the 1960’s fought to achieve.
He contrasted the sixties generation with the new generation of black youth sitting in jail. “…..these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake.”
Cosby attributed the chaos to breakdown in values, family, and personal responsibility. It’s the last thing the NAACP crowd wanted to hear that night and he paid a price. He was vilified and marginalized until he backed off.
Liberals never take on what black conservatives actually say because they can’t. So the attacks become personal.
Trillions of taxpayers’ dollars have been poured into black communities over the last half-century producing virtually no change in the incidence of black poverty.
Yet, Ben Carson, through diligence and traditional values, achieved on his own what those trillions of dollars of government programs were supposed to deliver.
Liberal black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates put the cards on the table in an article about Cosby which appeared in 2008 in The Atlantic magazine. The typical black conservative votes for Democrats, he notes, “not out of love for abortion rights.... but because he feels…. that the modern day GOP draws on support of people who hate him.”
So stoking paranoia about racism has always been the strategy of liberals to fend off the political threat of conservative values that so many church-going blacks embrace.
Predictably, Coates has produced a New York Times column on Carson, reducing this great man to the usual caricature of a black empty suit manipulated by white conservatives.
Ben Carson is an accomplished and wealthy man. Americans, certainly black Americans, need him in public life more than he needs to be in public life. Let’s hope the left wing and the haters of traditional morality don’t succeed in making him conclude it’s not worth it.
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Recently announced Vice Presidential pick Paul Ryan is being called a radical by the left for his fiscal policies. But no one would expect that anyone would imply that the Roman Catholic family man would be a Black Panther. Yet, the New York Times ran the headline "Paul Ryan, Black Panther?" on the day after the announcement was made. This was in a series called “Historically Corrected.”
(So when will the New York Times allow me to blog in a series titled “Why You Should Read George Orwell and Other Novelists”?)
This of course was false advertising, for anyone reading it could see that the three (three!) authors were stretching to make a connection between what Paul Ryan's father had often told him and a possible membership in the Black Panthers.
These three authors took a phrase that has over the decades become part of our everyday parlance--"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem"--traced its use back to Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and speculated that Ryan had made the "Republicans' big tent a little bigger." Is it a joke, or do they really want to imply that the Republican Party welcomes the Black Panthers who did more than serve breakfast to poor children, like rape and murder, including their own members?
And the three authors are not the proverbial Tea Partiers sitting around in their pajamas blogging about various conspiracies--as the left so often characterizes conservative bloggers.
No, these three individuals are professors at Washington College, where they are affiliated with the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
The regularly featured New York Times blog post, "Historically Corrected," under which this post ran, is a project of the Center's faculty and students. These three authors of the 680-word blog post were assisted by two student researchers.
The eminent scholars are:
The Center Director, Adam Goodheart, a Civil War historian, who blogs regularly for the New York Times "Opinionator" series, as well as for such publications as the Atlantic and American Scholar.
Peter Manseau, Scholar in Residence, also a lecturer in English, who is working on his doctorate in religious studies. Most of his writing is in fiction and memoir. His scholarship seems to veer toward the creative and religous--and not to "historical correction."
Ted Widmer is described as "former presidential speechwriter" and founding director of the Center. What is not stated in the byline is that Widmer was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I did not need a student assistant to soon find that Widmer is an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for American Progress. CAP, of course, is heavily funded by billionaire George Soros who was convicted for insider trading and who bankrolled Barack Obama's election. According to the website, Widmer "designed the prototype for the American Studies Institute, a collaborative project with the State Department that brings young Muslims to the United States for summer programs." We are told that his research "concentrates on U.S. history particularly presidential history, the colonial period, and the 19th and the 20th centuries." He is also "doing scholarly work on how U.S. history shapes electoral politics." Methinks it might be the other way around, especially given this latest account of Black Panther history.
We can expect smearing and innuendo during campaign season. We can expect it from the liberal media. We know about the campaign of personal attack begun in 1964 when it was honed so well by Daniel Schorr and Bill Moyers who went on to fame and fortune at the government media outlet NPR. But when supposed scholars engage in the smearing of a candidate through a stretch that would not meet the standards of the supermarket tabloid and under the pretense of correcting history that is a new low. These three scholars, instead, are acting like members of the Ministry of Truth, er, I mean Obama's "Truth Team."
Journalists at The New York Times are upset about their company pensions. One employee thinks that he might have to eat cat food in retirement, or even commit suicide. Is the Times a victim of its own arrogant liberal agenda? Find out.
Dr. Ben Carson stepped into the national spotlight recently when, as speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, to an audience that included President Obama, he was openly critical of the President’s approach to health care and his overall management of the nation’s economy.
