When everyone is fretting that your candidate for president is a stone-cold moron who can't tell Iraq from Iran from Alpha Centauri, there's only one obvious solution: Go on the record to the New York Times to confirm to the world that you guy is, in fact, exactly that dumb:
"Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East," Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security, said in an interview. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so "we can make him smart."
But as Ben Carson, Neurosurgeon M.D., would be forced to tell you, you can't just "make someone smart," like teaching WOPR from Wargames that global thermonuclear war isn't a good idea by forcing it to play a million games of tic-tac-toe. That's not stopping his people from trying, though: Another adviser, former CIA director Michael Hayden, recently declared that foreign policy "is a database with which he's very unfamiliar," but added that he just can't get his USB thumb drive to fit into Carson's ear.
But they're going to keep at it, and Carson's got a crackerjack team hard at work. This Duane Clarridge fellow, a former CIA agent, was indicted on seven counts of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal, only to be pardoned mid-trial by George Bush the First as the president was leaving office. That makes him the perfect person to be advising a Republican presidential contender, and you can be sure he's teaching Carson all the right terminology from that database:
"The jump from Erbil and Soviets" to the Chinese "in Damascus is a long leap," Mr. Clarridge said, using an ethnic slur for the Chinese.
Can't wait to hear Carson deploy his newfound knowledge in the next debate!
UPDATE: Here’s the Carson campaign’s chuckle-worthy response:
Mr. Clarridge has incomplete knowledge of the daily, not weekly briefings, that Dr. Carson receives on important national security matters from former military and State Department officials. He is coming to the end of a long career of serving our country. Mr. Clarridge's input to Dr. Carson is appreciated but he is clearly not one of Dr. Carson's top advisors. For the New York Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices.
