Carson campaign to fact-checkers: Google it

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 1 Comment
Dr. Ben Carson describes an episode of the 1980s TV series The Incredible Hulk.

Dr. Ben Carson describes an episode of the 1980s TV series The Incredible Hulk.

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer last week, Ben Carson said that Mahmoud Abbas, Ali Khamenei, and Vladimir Putin all knew each other at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University in 1968. It seems unlikely that the president of Palestine, the supreme leader of Iran and the homecoming king of Russia would all become friends at communist college—serendipitous even. And, lo and behold, it didn’t really happen. At least it didn’t in that nitpicking, fact-checker sense that there’s no evidence for it. When Politifact asked the Carson campaign where they got their information, they responded:

Thanks for your inquiry. We are not in the habit of providing Googling support to the media. If there is a specific aspect of Dr. Carson’s statement that you wish to challenge, please let us know and we can go from there.

There’s a unicorn in my refrigerator. Prove me wrong, dicks.

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Friday links! Sociable ghosts edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment
Illustration from "The Sociable Ghost" by Ellen D'Apery, 1903

Illustration from “The Sociable Ghost” by Ellen D’Apery, 1903

That’s a design-wreckingly vertical illustration, but my, how it pleases me. Everyone who is not dead yet is going to die. It’s cool you have an Apple Watch, but someday another person will remove it from your cold, stiffening wrist and count himself lucky before he dies. Then everyone who knows him will die. Then the space mantids of Alpha Proxima will be like, “Get back to work.” But our words will live on, and the stories of our deeds will be remembered long after our names are only sounds. Today is Friday, another minute in a game whose meaning abides in a handful of spectacular plays. Won’t you review the tapes with me?

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Trump a lock for GOP debate; Perry, Santorum, Jindal miss cut

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 1 Comment
Donald Trump explains an idea so obvious an idiot would agree with him.

Donald Trump explains another truth so obvious an idiot would agree with him.

The first Republican National Committee-sanctioned debate of the 2016 campaign is only three days away, but not every candidate will make the cut. Fox News announced that it would only invite the ten best-polling candidates from the field of 16, which sounds like maybe too many anyway, unless you happen to work for the Bobby Jindal campaign. “Whatever happened to the idea of freedom?” Jindal consultant Curt Anderson wrote of Fox’s plan. “Or democracy?” Soon every sentence uttered by a Republican on any subject will contain the word “freedom” and be in the past tense. Possibly coincidental to the demise of robust argument, Jindal, Lindsay Graham, and Ricks Santorum and Perry are all out of the top ten in NBC’s aggregate of the last five weeks’ polling. And Donald Trump is in the lead.

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