Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has spent the past week defending the veracity of various elements of his self-penned biography (violent acts as a youth, a West Point scholarship offer) against what he’s called “a bunch of lies” in the media. And Tuesday’s primary debate in Milwaukee offered the biggest forum yet for Carson to answer the core question that underpins the press inquiries: Are you honest and trustworthy
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Yet Carson didn’t take the question head-on, repeating previous assertions that he has been “lied about” before quickly deflecting attention to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s characterization of the 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
“I look at somebody like Hillary Clinton, who sits there and tells her daughter and a government official that no, this was a terrorist attack, and then tells everybody else that it was a video,” Carson said. “Where I come from, they call that a lie.
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The line earned applause but didn’t provide the kind of concrete explanation of Carson’s own inconsistencies that would put voters’ minds at ease -- or sate a media that clearly remains skeptical. The closest he came was saying, moments later, “That’s very different from, you know, somebody misinterpreting when I said that I was offered a scholarship to West Point.
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“That is the words that they used,” he added, presumably referring to his prior claim that a general told him he would get a full scholarship, as all West Point students do, if he applied to the military academy. But voters who haven’t followed the controversy closely (i.e. the people Carson still needs to convince) might have been confused by the vague response. And the media are certainly not going going to stop having questions.
It was a missed opportunity to thoroughly rebut and put an end to a major, negative storyline in his campaign.
Now, in Carson’s defense, the question posed by Fox Business Network moderator Neil Cavuto was, shall we say, oblique.
“You recently railed against the double standard in the media, sir, that seems obsessed with inconsistencies and potential exaggerations in your life story, but looked the other way when it came to then-Sen. Barack Obama's,” Cavuto began. “Still, as a candidate whose brand has always been trust, are you worried your …
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