An existential threat to satirists everywhere.
We now know why Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson has requested Secret Service protection so early in his campaign, a layer of security that
most major candidates qualify for but which many candidates
prefer to avoid. His reason, of course,
is suitably insane.
“I’d prefer not to talk about security issues but I have recognized — and people have been telling me for many many months — that I’m in great danger, because I challenge the secular progressive movement to the very core,” Carson told WABC radio’s Rita Cosby Show on Thursday. “You know, they see me as an existential threat but I also believe in the good lord and we take reasonable precautions.”
I am not generally one to second guess security considerations taken by major political figures—if Ben Carson wants Secret Service protection and meets the "viable candidate" criteria, Ben Carson should get Secret Service protection, although he should perhaps reimburse the government for that expense out of his campaign chest so it doesn't look quite so much like small government tea party icon Dr. Ben Carson only approves of federal government spending when it's spent on him, personally. But the notion that Ben Carson challenges the
secular progressive movement to the very core or represents an
existential threat to anything but America's previously high respect for brain surgeons suggests that Dr. Ben Carson has an opinion of himself that hovers between
Napoleonesque and Jesus Himself. The prime challenge Dr. Ben Carson represents to any American, save the people who have written him checks, is the challenge of parsing out what the hell he might be going on about, in any of his recent appearances; the
existential threat he represents to the
secular progressive movement, apparently meaning filthy Democrats and people who think a Muslim American has just as much right to run for president as Dr. Ben Carson does, is the
existential threat of making all modern political satire obsolete.
Dr. Ben Carson's ego appears to be endless. Not endless as in the emptiness of space, mind you, but endless as in pasta bowl.
It does, however, fit in with Carson's pitch as the paranoid candidate for a paranoid base. Recent days have seen the burning of southern black churches, arson attacks at Planned Parenthood clinics, and the National Rifle Association promoting images of hangman's nooses where "survivors of the [anti-gun] Democrat rebellion will meet their end." There are countless conservative militia groups, and people who armed themselves heavily in preparation for a Jade Helm takeover that never was, and anthrax attacks on Democratic elected officials and too-liberal media outlets, and a movement to "protect" illegal mining and grazing rights against the "illegitimate" forces of the Bureau of Land Management. Ben Carson does not wear a bulletproof vest to make public appearances; there are abortion-providing American doctors who wear them simply to travel from home to work.
Against this landscape, there is no modern movement or pattern "secular progressive" violence, but by God that doesn't mean Ben Carson's base doesn't think there's one lurking under every rock and behind every Starbucks cup. And they're out to get Dr. Ben Carson, Chosen Hero of the God Lovers and True Patriots, because this is the fumblebum who represents an existential threat to the violent leftists' godless utopia of elementary school children not getting shot, Muslim Americans not being barred from building their own places of worship, or a million brown people not being loaded onto trains because by gum, we've had about enough of all these brown people and that's that. Dr. Ben Carson, says Dr. Ben Carson, is key to it all.