Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson had a difficult Sunday, being pressed to say something intelligible about how he, as president, would deal with ISIS.
Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Carson could not name a specific country or leader he would call to assemble an international coalition to counter the Islamic State, despite being asked three times by host Chris Wallace.
"My point being that if we get out there and we really lead and it appears that we're making progress, that all of the Arab states and even the non-Arab states who are, I think, beginning to recognize that the jihad movement is global" will join, Carson said.
He suggested that he would shoot down a Russian plane if it violated a U.S.-led no-fly zone over Syria, even when told that the decision could prompt Russia to shoot down a U.S. plane in response.
"If they violate it, we will, in fact, enforce it. We'll see what happens. For us to always be backing down because we're afraid of a conflict, that's not how we became a great nation, Chris," he said.
He also reiterated that the Chinese are in Syria and that they have provided arms that are "very sophisticated and are obviously going to require support in order to operate." His intelligence about the Chinese in Syria, which is apparently not available to the administration, seems to be coming from a virulently anti-Muslim retired general, Maj. Gen. Robert Dees. In speeches to fundamentalist Christian organizations, Dees has maintained that the U.S. has been "infilibrated" by Muslim extremists, saying that Nashville, Tennessee, Dearborn, Michigan, Greensboro, South Carolina, and Lackawanna, New York are "all Islamic sanctuaries in the United States within which there are fundamentalist sleeper cells."
He also says that President Obama has degraded the military's "moral readiness" with "social engineering" on gay and gender issues, and that common core education standards are a threat to national security. Also, too, we are a "post-Christian nation" thanks to Obama, and a nation of "moral demise," which means we will fall just like Rome. Clearly, Obama needs to be getting his intelligence from this guy.