March 16, 2013
National Review
Dr. Benjamin Carson, the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital who garnered national headlines for his pointed remarks at last month’s National Prayer Breakfast, says that President Obama and his political allies are trying to “destroy the country.”
“Let’s say somebody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation,” Carson postulated in remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now.”
Carson, who is 62, said that the blame for the nation’s current state of affairs does not lie with “any one particular person.” His barbs, though, were clearly aimed at President Obama.
Drawing a link between his medical practice and his political beliefs, Carson argued that righting the nation’s course requires governance “of and by the people.” “That’s why we have these complex brains,” he explained, and went on to joke, “the number of interconnections you have [between neurons] rivals the national debt.”
At the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Carson — with President Obama as a captive audience — lodged a full-frontal assault on the president’s agenda, from progressive taxation to Obamacare. Carson’s remarks led to calls, most notably from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, for him to launch a presidential bid come 2016. He will retire from medicine in three months and, though he declined to discuss his particular plans, he indicated that he hopes to become further involved in educational initiatives; Carson founded a scholarship fund in 1996.
In an event billed as “President Obama’s (National Prayer) Breakfast Club,” Carson shared the stage with Eric Metaxas, the author of a biography of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who used his time on stage at 2012’s breakfast to argue that progressives have distorted Christianity in the service of political ideology.
