Discussion:

13 is in the top 500? Several of the top 10 are meh.

Big LOL at #16

If so, then I sort of feel bad for getting a laugh–albeit a tepid one–at his expense. If true, then someone who is very close to him should somehow rein in the dude before he continues to make that much more of a fool of himself.

Or fact checking. His response shows a pathological dismissal of accuracy.

Nothing wrong with leaving out the details you don’t remember. Much wrong with just making shit up. Now that he has admitted that his books are full of fabricated shit, it is fair to subject everything in them to scrutiny.

They had to pay him $10 to get him to leave the room so they didn’t have to wait for him to finish the exam.

So 149 Yale students suddenly realized it was a hoax and walked out, and Ben never heard any of the discussion? Also, without the hoax aspect, the honesty part of it falls apart as well. This story is BS, whether it is based on a half-assed hoax or not.

Ben Carson is a highly dishonest person. And he is a simpleton to boot. I can’t explain why he was able to be a successful brain surgeon, but I can’t explain why Dick Cheney looks so damn healthy either.

Some things are mysteries. And sometimes even mysteries aren’t worth figuring out.

(what can I say-I’m on a Borimir kick)

Carsons reaction and response concerns me far more than some of his conflations and false memories.

Legacy…

If he had just stated that he embellished these stories to make a better book, I think we would soon just get tired of all this and move on. But despite his embellishments, he chooses to blame others, including the media. So, we are supposed to believe that he is somehow exonerated because the press is doing its job, checking his stories. And then he says they should be covering the issues. But there are very few issues because of his web site only devotes three paragraphs to one issue, a superficial diatribe about how horrible Obamacare is. Or perhaps they should delve deeper into Carson’s statement that Obama is a psychopath. So, the media is very unfair but it is ok to call Obama a psychopath with zero substantiation.

Actually, there is something wrong with leaving out easily checked details you don’t remember. It speaks to an unwillingness or inability (or both) to do the basic research. I would not consider writing an autobiography that made specific references to my experiences as a student without a transcript at hand. It would be better if copies of the course schedules for each term and the College catalogs were also near by.

Ben Carson’s high school freshman portrait can be found here:

https://archive.org/stream/National_Lampoon_1964_High_School_Yearbook_Parody_1979#page/n1/mode/2up

I have to say I find Carson refreshing compared to the problem which Bush, Romney and The Rump all share. Instead of being born on third base and thinking he hit a triple, Carson feels the need to dig the dugout deeper, to make his perfectly valid double seem all the more impressive.

Sorry, but I just went to a sate university. I am correct in believing that the student humor magazine actually has a historian. Jesus–I guess I really am a 99%er…

Mom may have backed him up on that one back in the 1990s according to ABC and Stephanopoulus.

Agree to the first part. In Carson’s case, I attribute the failure to do the research to a belief that it is the story that matters, not the facts. In other words, he didn’t give a damn about the “filler” details.

I wonder how much the guy I knew 25 years ago embellished his hanky-panky when he went to his minister to confess his sins…? He was an athlete who became “born again” early in his career after being an alcoholic, so he turned to horn-dog activities instead, all the while still going to Wednesday night bible study classes.

From what he told me, his behavior was not unusual among his peers.

Don’t mention the pyramids !

To be fair, that’s more or less how memory works. It’s not like a data recording of events, it’s more like a series of notes, and when you access those notes, the brain attempts to reconstruct the event from the notes. After a certain point, you’re not actually remembering the event so much as remembering remembering the event, because the brain can’t tell the difference.

It’s almost an internal version of ‘repeat a lie often enough, and they’ll believe it’ - recount events to yourself with ‘X’ alteration long enough, and you won’t remember that wasn’t how it went.

None of which excuses Carson, of course - if anything,it should give people more pause about the guy’s candidacy. This is a man who can apparently convince himself of a large number of outright lies because his version of events is more palatable to him. What happens the first time someone tells him 'Mr. President, the Joint Chiefs are recommending a proportionate response"? Will he remember authorizing a targeted strike w/part of a SEAL Team, or will he have convinced himself that everyone had agreed it would be better to send in a couple of Marine Battalions?

…which, i suspect, is part of Carson going too.