Ben Carson has been facing a lot of questions about his qualifications for the presidency, and specifically his lack of experience in pretty much every area of expertise that a president may need to be versed in. So Ben Carson has done what any reasonable candidate for the presidency would do to respond to these concerns: penned a long post on Facebook.
You are absolutely right — I have no political experience. The current Members of Congress have a combined 8,700 years of political experience. Are we sure political experience is what we need. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience.
If you are thinking that Dr. Ben Carson is going to go the Palinesque route of declaring that his own lack of political expertise doesn't just make him _better_ than the people who do have that experience, it in fact makes him akin to Our Founding Fathers Themselves, you are correct. If you think Dr. Ben Carson is going to summarily ignore all of the elected offices the actual signers of the Declaration of Independence indeed had held before their service in the Continental Congress, rendering his statement absolutely false right off the bat, you are also correct. But to hell with the facts, it's Ben Carson time:
What they had was a deep belief that freedom is a gift from God. They had a determination to rise up against a tyrannical King. They were willing to risk all they had, even their lives, to be free. Today we find ourselves with an entire class of politicians. No one in Philadelphia, during that summer our nation was born, dreamed that service was a career with a pension. America was the land of the Citizen Statesmen. They were merchants, lawyers, farmers — and yes, even doctors. They were willing to stand for freedom.
And this is why Ben Carson should be president. Why? No idea. Because Ben Carson thinks he's like a Founding Father, and Ben Carson stands for freedom, and that is pretty much all you need to say when you're running for president on the political platform of Hell If Anybody Knows.
Today, the political class stands in the way, not for the people. They demand pensions and perks. This is not what our Founders envisioned for America. I spent my life treating very ill children. Over 15,000 times I gave my all to prolong their lives. I was blessed to do it. But when it came time for me to retire, I simply could not sit back any longer. These children became my family. What our government is doing to them is outrageous. I am prepared to risk all that I have to try and make a difference in their future. I built one of the nation’s best medical centers. I served for two decades on the boards of Costco and Kellogg. I built a national scholarship program.
This is all fine and good—but there are, in America, a great many people who feel similar calls to service, some of whom do so quietly and some of whom leverage the call into damn fine and profitable careers of their own, with many a _perk_, and we do not make them all president. There are a great many people in America who are convinced that the government is doing people wrong—say, by instituting critically needed but still frustratingly patchwork-like healthcare reform ideas that an unhinged crazy person might convince themselves was "worse than slavery"—and we judge them not only by the shoutingness with which they say that or how many flags they set behind themselves when saying it, but whether they are Right or whether they are Wrong. Being loud, certain, and Wrong does not constitute being like one of the Founding Fathers. Not liking the way the other political party does things and saying so does not elevate you to the status of Patriot. We count ourselves lucky when those people can get themselves up off the couch to vote—it is not of itself a qualification for higher office. You can be a wonderful person ...
I didn’t go to embassy cocktail parties or beg lobbyists for money. I spent night after night in a quiet, sterile room trying to save the life of a small child. That was my life’s service.
... and still not be the right person to command the nation's military, run the nation's administrative offices, and guide the national priorities. Dr. Ben Carson wants to be president. This much we know. And what he brings to the table are speeches about the greatness of America and the nobleness that is being Dr. Ben Carson, peppered with (1) policy pronouncements that lie somewhere between pointless fluff and outright economic delusion, (2) social pronouncements that lie somewhere between merely odd and deeply alarming, (3) historical and political proclamations that lie somewhere between embarrassingly misinformed and just flat-out hokum, and so on. All of this has led people to ask Dr. Ben Carson what he believes he brings to the political table that qualifies him, above all the others, to lead us all. His response continues to be less than compelling. As an aside, after everyone everywhere pointed out that Dr. Ben Carson was very, very wrong in his pronouncement that none of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held elected office, Dr. Ben Carson then altered his post to declare that none of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held _federal_ elected office. Given that there no _federal_ government even existed at the time, that being one of the particular reasons the fellows involved were getting together to Declare a few things, this statement is both true and, if possible, an even more embarrassing proclamation than his original version. So as we said: Less than compelling.