Ben Carson, or the tale of the disappearing Cabinet secreta
Weird duck is what I call him
Ben Carson, or the tale of the disappearing Cabinet secretary
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ben-carson-or-the-tale-of-the-disappearing-cabinet-secretary/2018/02/05/74c46de8-04ff-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_carsonhud-923am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.61331695274d
By Ben Terris February 6 Email the author
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Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson meeting with lawmakers and advocates in Lexington, Ky., last month. (Philip Scott Andrews/For The Washington Post)
It was Christmastime in Washington, and Ben Carson couldn’t stop talking about the apocalypse.
“Did you know,” the secretary of housing and urban development asked his acting chief of staff, Deana Bass, at a Capitol Hill holiday party, “that if North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon into our exosphere, it could take out our entire electrical grid?”
Bass shook her head.
“What’s that movie where there’s complete lawlessness and anarchy for one night a year?” Carson said, calmly resting his right hand over his left. “ ‘The Purge’! It will be like ‘The Purge’ all the time.”
Carson is an acclaimed neurosurgeon who oversees a large government agency for which he has no particular qualifications and in this way represents the grand theme of the Trump administration. He, like the president, came to power by promising that an outsider would have the “common sense” it takes to cure what ails us.
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Who is Ben Carson?
Former GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson is now President Trump's housing and urban development secretary. Here's what you need to know about him. (Video: Sarah Parnass, Osman Malik/Photo: Joe Raedle/The Washington Post)
And so, while conservative gadfly Armstrong Williams played host to this party at the Monocle restaurant, it was Carson everyone came to see.
“There’s never been a time in the history of the world where a society became divided like this and did well,” Carson said as a crowd — including an off-duty New York Times reporter, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, a slew of representatives from housing nonprofit organizations and old friends from his presidential campaign — circled him. “And we don’t really have a reason to be fighting each other. There was a movie some years ago, a Will Smith movie called ‘Independence Day’ .?.?.”
With his soothing, story-time cadences and heavy-lidded gaze, Carson proceeded to hold forth on how Earth’s near-annihilation laid bare the superficiality of all the world’s strife. If only, he argued, people realized that the fate of humanity hung in the balance, then Palestinians and Jews, or even the United States and Russia, could be “like best friends.”
Carson has been telling stories about a dystopian future ever since he got into politics. In 2014 he warned audiences that if Republicans didn’t win back the Senate, there might not even be an election in 2016. And when there was an election in 2016, Carson ran for president with a simple message: Democrats and career politicians were taking the country on a dark path.
In his new role, Carson still sees himself as a warrior against impending doom, but he’s battling contradictions on the side. He wants to be a good steward for an agency he calls the “philanthropic” arm of the government, even if he doesn’t think of the government as a philanthropy. He wants to clean up the swamp but finds himself swimming in ethically murky water.............................
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