http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/11/09/the_latest_on_the_ben_carson_smearThe Latest on the Ben Carson Smear
November 09, 2015
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RUSH: The latest on the Ben Carson story, in no particular order. I'm gonna go back to November 6th here. This is last Friday at the end of the day, which was a barn-burner of a day here on the EIB Network. "Where Politico's Ben Carson Scoop Went Wrong." Now, to refresh your memory, Politico runs a story on Friday claiming... Well, they didn't "claim" anything. They wanted the reader to believe that Ben Carson, in his book and on the campaign trail, has been telling people that he applied for admission to West Point and was accepted and was offered a four-year scholarship and then went to West Point.
That was what they wanted everybody to think. It was such a rotten, poorly written headline. And the story was bouncing off the headline. And the story was Carson's claims untrue, campaign admits, apologizes or whatever. But the thing is, Carson never said that he went to West Point, he never said that he applied.
All he had said was that he was leading ROTC student in Detroit at one point and, as such, met General Westmoreland, and General Westmoreland spoke highly of West Point as he would to any ROTC person and extolled the virtues of going there and made it clear to Carson that if he did go, it would be paid for, it would be a scholarship. It turns out we have found advertising paraphernalia for West Point that they use that even describes what they do as a scholarship. They tried to say that Carson lied because there are no scholarships at West Point. Well, the Naval Academy, too, but everybody just gets in. And it's an obligation. Everybody goes to the two academies on a scholarship.
Anyway, the whole thing blew up because it became clear that Carson had never done anything that he had to admit. He hadn't lied. But the other aspects of his story about beating up a kid and being a bully and having a violent youth and so forth and they're trying to track people down and they can't find any evidence of it, so that means Carson's lying. And that became the premise for the story. Anyway, it didn't take long to totally blow up The Politico story and illustrate it for the phony journalism that it was. Not just the biased, but racist journalism that it was. And so, at the end of the day on Friday some news organizations were starting to hit The Politico.
This was CNN Dylan Byers: "Where Politico's Ben Carson 'Scoop' Went Wrong -- What initially looked like a disaster for Ben Carson could now be a major black eye for Politico. On Friday, Politico reported that Carson had 'fabricated' his application and acceptance into West Point, and that his campaign had acknowledged as much in an interview. That story was initially headlined 'EXCLUSIVE: Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship.' It seemed like the sort of story that had the potential to ruin Carson's ambitions for the presidency. But the Politico story was not accurate on some key points."
It wasn't accurate on much of anything, folks. "And in the wake of pushback from the Carson campaign -- which called the story an 'outright lie' -- Politico softened its headline, removed the 'fabrication' language, and changed some key details -- even as it said it was 'standing by its story.'" But there was never any evidence in Politico's story that Carson ever claimed to have applied to West Point, yet they said that he did. Well, no. The way they wrote the headline and the accompanying story, they wanted the reader to think that Carson had written a book, and in the book he accepted a scholarship to West Point and attended, and now Politico had discovered that he never went to West Point. And so what they want, "My God, did you hear what Ben Carson's doing? Ben Carson lied about going to West Point. Why would somebody lie about going to West Point? And why, after all this time of lying about it, wouldn't West Point come out and say he never was there?"
Well, 'cause he never lied about going to West Point. He never lied about applying. He never lied about getting a scholarship. The whole thing was an assassination piece, as I so clearly and brilliantly laid out on Friday. "Following pushback from the Carson campaign, Politico softened its headline and changed its lead." Mediaite even had a story: "Politico Changes Headline of Controversial Ben Carson West Point Story." But this story's from this morning. Politico is still lying about it, even in their updated editor's note. The editor's note continues to say that he implied that he applied for admission, when the quote they cite goes on to say the opposite. He never applied. He simply said that Westmoreland made it available or made it sound like something attractive to do, but Carson from the get-go always said no, medicine is where I want to go. He never even toyed with the idea. And yet even the revised Politico story and the editor's note tries to imply that he applied for admission and, of course, didn't get it, which is why he didn't go, and that's why he's lying. He can't face the humiliation of being turned down in his application to West Point. But he didn't apply.
So even as of the weekend Politico was still trying to turn the screws in after trying to appease some of their buddies in the media by softening the headline. But Ben Carson never once claimed he applied or was granted admission to West Point. I played golf Saturday morning. I played golf and a guy came up to me, "Gee, Rush, how about that Ben Carson story, lying about West Point." And I said, "Tim, please go back and look at it. You're buying into a bill of goods. This is exactly what they want people to think. He never applied, he never went, he never said he did, either. Everything in that story is an out-and-out lie." And he looked at me -- and he's one of us -- he looked at me with his mouth wide open, he couldn't believe.
I mean, I didn't even engage in a conversation. I just said, "Tim, it's not true. You're falling for it. Don't be a dupe like this. He never went. He never applied. The whole thing is a made-up lie." The look on his face was all you needed. He couldn't believe it.
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RUSH: Tim looked at me like he didn't know what I was talking about, like I was the nutcase. I mean, that's the danger. He saw it, he saw it in the news. He didn't see the original in Politico. I asked him where he saw it, I forget what he said, wasn't the Politico. He saw it in some repeating network. It's a great illustration of what we continually are up against.
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