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Thursday, October 15, 2015

Ben Carson Goes Newt Gingrich

If you wonder why today's GOP is such a mess, this is a classic symptom. A totally dysfunctional party

Ben Carson is closing in on Trump in some polls so what does he do? He suspends his campaign for two weeks to go on a book tour. 

Shades of Newt in 2012-and, of course, Sarah Palin who left being Alaska Governor to cash in as a Fox News celebrity. 

This is guy close to the top of most polls for the Republican presidential primary and he's more worried on selling his books. 

In the House, they can't elect a Speaker. Their strategy of bringing down Hillary by rifling through her emails has been publicly exposed and the Benghazi Committee has lost all credibility. 

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/10/ny-republican-lashes-out-at-benghazi.html

This is less a party than a bad joke. 

Ben Carson’s profoundly strange campaign for President just got weirder. In the middle of a Presidential election cycle in which he’s remarkably close to catching up with republican frontrunner Donald Trump in the polls, Carson is suspending his entire campaign for two weeks so he can instead travel the country promoting his latest book. This begs the question of whether he’s truly eccentric enough to do such a thing and think it’s a good idea, or whether this is a pullback from the public eye after widespread criticism for a string of offensive remarks he’s made this month."

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/ben-carson-suspends-all-campaign-events-to-go-on-book-tour/22822/

I mean this is not a good idea assuming Carson's top priority is to actually win the nomination. It's not such a bad idea if it's actually to: sell more books.

Some of his behavior kind of seems consistent with the latter:

"Carson’s camp claims that the book tour is standard fare. His spokesman says that the only way to avoid getting in trouble with the Federal Election Commission is to shut down the campaign entirely in favor of the book tour. But this is a weird move even for a guy who thinks the Holocaust was caused by gun control and that there should be a religious test for American Presidents, and claims that he once survived a robbery by telling the gunman to target the cashier instead of himself. No candidate for President this high in the polls suspends his campaign during the middle of primary season without a good reason. But there may be something else at play here."

"From the start, Ben Carson’s actions have suggested that his Presidential campaign is a money grab. He threatened to sue his own supporters when he found out that they were making homemade t-shirts with his likeness, instead of buying them from his official online store. No one does that unless they care more about profiting from the t-shirt revenue than they do about winning. This sudden book tour further suggests that his campaign is all about money. As a result of his higher profile, he’ll sell millions of additional copies of his book to the extremists who have fallen in love with him – even as he risks letting his poll numbers slide while he steps away from the campaign. Turns out maybe winning isn’t everything after all."

That someone like this is close to the lead in the party's Presidential primary says it all.


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