“Do you ever yell?” Dr. Ben Carson, the GOP presidential candidate who became the first surgeon ever to successfully separate conjoined twins at the head—and who once separated conjoined twins played by Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear in the film Stuck on You—decided on Tuesday morning to take his newfound political acumen to The View, braving the ladies’ hot seat. And things started off easy. No, Carson doesn’t yell anymore. He used to, you see, before his come-to-Jesus moment. Now, he speaks in a muted whisper, because that’s what Jesus would do.
After hawking his new book America the Beautiful, the co-hosts grilled Carson on the handful of bizarre comments he’s made in recent weeks along the campaign trail. First, the comment he made comparing the leftist Obama administration to… the second coming of Hitler’s Third Reich. “If people don’t speak up for what they believe, then other people will change things without them having a voice. Hitler changed things there and nobody protested. Nobody provided any opposition to him.” Naturally, co-host Joy Behar took Carson to task for the Hitler comparison, causing the candidate for the highest office in the land to look visibly shaken and uncomfortable. Heck, he even raised his voice!“Now, what I was saying about the Hitler comment—and I purposely said that because I knew the left-wing would go crazy with ‘he said Hitler!’” exclaimed Carson. “So what I said is most of the people in Nazi Germany did not believe in what Hitler was doing, but did they speak up? No. They kept their mouths shut. And when you do that, you’re compromising your freedom and the freedom of people that come behind you. You have to be willing to stand up for what you believe in.”
Cue Behar. “But… Hitler won the election in Germany,” she said. “He won the election.” But Carson couldn’t be bothered with these pesky little things called “facts,” so he vaguely replied, “It doesn’t matter what he did. We know he’s an evil man.”
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Co-host Michelle Collins eventually switched topics to the recent mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon that left nine innocent people dead at the hands of a heavily-armed gunman. Carson recently said of the shooting, “If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn’t”—in other words, Carson was advocating arming kindergarten teachers, because Miss Lippy from Billy Madison packing serious heat is a great idea.Carson backpedaled a bit when it came to having strapped-up coloring book connoisseurs. “Not all kindergarten teachers. I said people who are trained and understand all the implications,” he said. “And you’re obviously not just going to have a weapon sitting on the kindergarten teacher’s desk. It would be secured in a place where kids could not get to it.” Then Behar, who apparently has not seen the movie Kindergarten Cop as many times as Carson, furrowed her brow, and replied, “So, if a gunman comes in with an AK-47 or an AR-15, how fast can that teacher go to the locked drawer and get that gun?” “Well, I want that teacher trained in diversionary tactics and whatever needs to be done in order to get there, and I want there to be other people in that school who also know how to get there,” Carson replied.
Yes, if kindergarten teachers didn’t have it bad enough, Carson is advocating that they now be trained in “diversionary tactics,” like… Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Det. John “I’m a cop, you idiot!” Kimble.
The next topic was evolution—something that Ben Carson, who by the way holds a medical degree, thinks is the stuff of atheistic fairy tales.
“I’ve had discussions with Nobel laureates on this, and they have to admit, ‘Well, we don’t know everything,’” said Carson about evolution. “Let me explain. First of all, evolution… Microevolution versus macroevolution are two different things. We’re talking about natural selection when we’re talking about microevolution. I believe, yes, organisms have an ability to adapt to their environment, and they have the ability to change. Now, the evolutionists say that that’s proof positive of evolution. I say it’s proof positive of an intelligent Creator who gave his creatures the ability to adapt to the environment so that they don’t have to start over every 50 years.”Every 50 years? Whatever.
Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Whoopi Goldberg vs. Ben Carson.
Goldberg quizzed Carson on why he doesn’t believe there’s a “war on women,” but instead feels that there’s a “war inside of women.”“Yeah. The babies. I mean, we’re killing babies all over the place,” he said. “I think people can probably understand, in my case, I’ve spent my entire career trying to preserve life, and preserve quality of life—even operating on babies in the womb, operating all night long sometimes on premature babies. And I get to meet those people when they’re adults, and productive adults. There’s no way you cannot convince me that they’re not important, that they’re just a mass of cells and we can’t do anything for them.”“Have you met with the women who have to make these horrendous decisions—when they have to make them—of whether or not they can bring a child into the world?” asked Goldberg. “We talk about bringing children into the world all the time, but periodically, some women feel, ‘I just can’t.’ Are you empathetic to them?”“I’m very empathetic,” an uneasy Carson responded. “Very empathetic. And what I have said is that this is a job for us in the private sector. What we need to do is make sure that we provide adequate day-care centers for these mothers so that they can get their GED, their bachelor’s degree, their master’s degree.”“I’m talking about most of them [who are uneducated],” he continued of abortion seekers. “The fact is, a lot of those young girls that are having babies out of wedlock, when they have their first baby, they stop their education and their child is four times as likely to grow up in poverty. We as a society have an obligation to do what is necessary to stop that cycle from occurring.”
Then Behar, an outspoken liberal, joined the fray.“So then how important is birth control to the Republican Party?” she asked. “They should be out there applauding Planned Parenthood for supplying birth control, mammograms, and everything else. Why are they against Planned Parenthood?” “No, I’m not against [birth control],” Carson replied, steering the conversation away from Planned Parenthood. “Here’s what I believe in, because I get sick and tired of people—particularly progressives—who say, ‘Carson grew up poor, he must have benefitted from government programs, and now he wants to withdraw all the programs for poor people.’ I’ve heard that so many times, and you’ve heard it too, and it’s a bunch of crap! What I actually want to do is provide people with a mechanism of coming out of the state of dependency and climbing the ladder and becoming part of the fabric of America.” If all that weren’t enough, the ladies grilled Carson on his 2013 comments saying Obamacare was the worst thing to happen to the American people “since slavery.” Carson not only didn’t back down from the comment, but actually tried to defend it.
“Let me tell you why: because this is supposed to be a country of, for, and by the people. The government is supposed to be there to facilitate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he said. “With this particular act, the government comes along and says, ‘We don’t care what you people think. This is what we’re doing, we’re cramming it down your throat, and if you don’t like it, too bad. That essentially shifts the relationship between the people and the government. The people are supposed to be at the pinnacle and the government works for us, it’s not the other way around, and we need to restore that.”
