Pic Of The Moment: Ben Carson: True Or False?

[COMALite J]

32. In fairness to Carson, he did NOT claim to have APPLIED FOR a West Point scholarship.

He merely claimed to have been offered one, on Memorial Day by General Westmoreland.

At the time, West Point did indeed use the term “scholarship” to describe the free ride they offer to all of their prospective students (in return for a commitment to serve in the military after graduation or otherwise leaving West Point — failure to do so puts the student on the hook for tuition and other costs accrued during their stay there) in their official marketing materials. He claims to have turned down the offer so that he could study medicine at Yale (despite the fact that West Point has a very good pre-med program and would also have paid for his medical school, since the military needs competent medics), so the lack of any record of him applying in no way contradicts what he actually asserted in his biography.

Carson was definitely mistaken (at best) about who he got the offer from, or when he got it, since records show that Gen. Westmoreland wasn’t in Detroit on Memorial Day of that year, but was in Washington, D.C. playing golf at the time that Carson recalls getting the offer. That said, Westmoreland was in Detroit in February of that year, so it’s possible that he did make such an offer to young Carson then, and Carson subsequently conflated the two events in his memory (human memory is quite fallible in this regard).

He is definitely wrong, but not in a way that can be shown to be outright fabrication as the linked articles claim.

He is absolutely incompetent to be President or indeed anything other than a neurosurgeon, though. He seems to be an autistic savant: very skilled in one very narrow field, and practically retarded in almost everything else including basic common sense. I’m just not willing to call him a liar based on what can be explained by faulty memory.