SOURCE: http://www.nationalreview.com/node/426728/print
Carson’s campaign manager says that Carson was introduced to “folks from West Point by his ROTC supervisors. . . . They told him they could help him get an appointment based on his grades and performance in ROTC.”
What, exactly, is the story here? If it’s simply that he should have described military officials’ expressions of enthusiasm with more precision, then this is truly a tempest in a teapot.
His account, in fact, resonates with my own experience. Many years ago I was “offered†an ROTC scholarship before I even applied. After speaking with officers familiar with my academic record, they told me I would receive a full academic scholarship, and that the application was a mere formality. My teenage self certainly took their statements as an “offer,” and I wouldn’t have applied without their word. (I filled out the forms and was formally accepted, but declined in favor of a better scholarship elsewhere.)
At the same time, CNN’s effort to call into question Carson’s story about his childhood anger issues is both weak and malicious. The network interviewed ten people from his neighborhood about 50-year-old incidents that Carson claims they never witnessed, and now peddle a story raising doubts about claims in Carson’s biography. What? Is it now the case that CNN can interview ten people about decades-old life events that didn’t happen to them and now breathlessly proclaim a “scoop.”
The story here is that Ben Carson said he met Westmoreland at the ROTC banquet on Memorial Day in 1969. Actually, Westmoreland was in Washington DC on Memorial Day, 1969, as Army records clearly show.
That means Ben Carson may well have lied about ever even meeting Westmoreland.
I understand that Carson's campaign is now trying to backpedal a bit and say that it may have been in February that Westmoreland and Carson met. But yet, Carson's book make a very oddly specific claim that they met *at a banquet* and *on Memorial Day in 1969.* That is hard to fuzzy down to "we probably met in February."
The problem with Carson is that whenever the details of his life's story start to be questioned, he suddenly gets oddly obfuscatory and non-specific.
That's...problematic in a presidential candidate.
This has nothing to do with "did Carson get offered a scholarship to West Point." That's not even an issue in what I'm talking about here. It has no relevance. The issue is quite a bit bigger - and more open to genuine fact-checking.