Bill Press: Carson: Smart, but wrong

Everybody knows the Republican presidential primary has been good for cable television. The first two GOP debates scored record-high ratings for Fox News and for CNN, and record-high revenue from advertisers — and this week’s encounter should do the same for CNBC.

Bet the party’s primary has been good for Prilosec sales, too. Establishment Republicans are having nothing but heartburn every time the latest poll numbers come out. 

{mosads}Senators and governors, all those running for the highest office with any government experience, are at the bottom, while the three outsider candidates — Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina — are at the top.

It’s not too hard to figure out why. 

Clearly, nothing’s working in Washington today. Not only is the whole system broken, it’s stacked against middle-class Americans. Voters on the right and on the left are fed up. It makes sense that they’re attracted by anybody who’s not part of politics as usual.

That explains Trump. Sure, he’s a big, colorful carnival barker, but the real estate tycoon been a hugely successful businessman and actually built a few things in this country(or at least put his name on them). 

It’s the same with Fiorina — while she may not have government experience, the former Hewlett-Packard chief’s time in the private sector looks good on paper. And how many voters know that Fortune magazine ranked her as one of America’s worst CEOs?

In a perverse way, perhaps, those two make sense. But what’s impossible to figure out is Carson’s appeal. 

Granted, he was a brilliant brain surgeon. But there are a lot of brilliant heart surgeons, astrophysicists and chemical engineers out there, too, and we wouldn’t necessarily think about tapping one of them to be president.

Remember, Carson first emerged as a celebrity among the religious right based on the story of how he was saved from flunking chemistry at Yale by an angel who appeared in his dream the night before and revealed to him all the questions that would show up on an exam the next day. 

Whether you believe that fairy tale or not, is that how he promises to govern? “Send ground troops to Syria? Don’t worry. I’ll sleep on it. God will send an angel to tell me what to do.”

Beyond that flight of fiction, Carson brings nothing to the table. He has no previous interest or experience in politics. He has zero foreign policy experience. He has no ideas and no energy. When he speaks, he not only puts you to sleep, he makes you wonder whether he’s awake.

Meanwhile, he says the most outrageous things.

Carson believes that all prisons are homosexual conversion factories: You go in straight, you come out gay. He calls ObamaCare the worst thing to happen to America since slavery. He compares contemporary America to Nazi Germany. He wants to arm kindergarten teachers with guns. And he blames Jews for the Holocaust because they didn’t have guns and didn’t fight back. 

Statements like that make Trump look sane.

A final word on Carson: If you ever needed it, you wouldn’t think about having anybody operate on your brain who didn’t have the right training or experience. That same rule should apply to picking someone to be president of the United States.  

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of “The Obama Hate Machine.”