Ben Carson Nominated HUD Secretary

Okay, Sleepy Ben is a particularly bad nomination as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It's the kind of pick people feared Trump would make: a token African-American, nominated for a difficult job for which he is totally unqualified. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."

Trump attacked Carson, former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, during the campaign; according to an article in Politico:

When Carson overtook Trump in national polling in the fall, the Manhattan real-estate developer attacked portions of his biography, comparing accounts of Carson's violent incidents as an adolescent to that of a "child molester" in that both are "pathological."

“As an example: child molesting. You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that," Trump said in November. At one point, Trump even did a mock re-enactment of Carson's account of the time he tried to stab someone, only to fail because of a belt buckle.

Trump now says his harsh words were "just part of the game."

One of the HUD secretary's responsibilities is to enforce anti-discrimination laws, including the Fair Housing Act. According to another Politico article:

Last year, President Barack Obama's administration adopted the new fair housing rule, which relies on big data to ferret out patterns of segregation that might be caused, even inadvertently, by zoning and other municipal decisions. Last year, Carson took aim at the Obama rule.

"These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse," Carson wrote in the Times. "Based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous."

In November, when Carson was said to be considered for a government post, his close friend and business manager Armstrong Williams said Carson would not be joining the Trump administration: "Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience; he's never run a federal agency," Williams said. "The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency."

Well, I guess he's changed his mind, and is taking a position that could cripple the presidency after all. Grifters gotta grift, and Carson's preposterous presidential run was a complete scam.

Asked about his qualifications for the HUD job in an interview on Fox News, Carson said: "I grew up in the inner city and have dealt with a lot of patients from that area and recognize that we cannot have a strong nation if we have weak inner cities."

That takes care of the "urban" in Housing and Urban Development. He's also lived in a house.

Stabby Ben appears to me never to have opened any kind of book except for medical textbooks -- and he is a renowned neurosurgeon -- and the Bible.

He did once demonstrate his quick wit by convincing someone who pulled a gun on him while he was in "a Popeye's establishment" to rob the guy behind the cash register instead. Oh, and he attacked his mother with a hammer.



Of course, he is on close personal terms with Black Jesus, so there's that.