It’s not every day that one gets to hear a citizen, no matter how influential or powerful, use derogatory words to describe the most powerful character in the country and arguably, the world. Republican presidential contender – Ben Carson had the gumption to call President Barack Obama naïve on the threat that ISIS poses to American freedom.
According to Eric Bardner of CNN, Carson believes President Obama downplayed the threat posed by ISIS at the year-end interview with NPR. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Ben Carson takes a dig at Obama;
“We’re not in the era now where you send, you know, big armies to fight or, you know, air forces. We’re in a place where you use a jet plane as a missile to knock down buildings; where dirty bombs can be used to extinguish large numbers of people,” Carson said.
“There are lots of different techniques that you use — cyber-attacks, attacking our electrical grid,” he said. “You know, these are things that are all well within their capabilities, and particularly when they use them in tandem.”
To back up his position, Carson cited his recent trip to Jordan on a visit to refugees fleeing from ISIS and the Syrian war. Citing security concerns, he canceled his trip to Israel.
Paranoia or fact?
Carson continued:
“There’s a lot of things that can happen in this country, and we need to be planning for those things,” Carson said Monday on CNN. “We cannot take a wait and see and react type of attitude. We’ve got to be forward-thinking very quickly to protect the American people.”
Then, he reacts to Hillary Clinton’s summation of Trump’s anti-Muslim rant:
“There’s no question that they use anything that they can against us,” Carson said. “They use anything that they can possibly get their hands on to try to make their case and particularly to go after the disaffected people of the world, and what we need to be thinking about is how do we give them a different message — disaffected ones — so that they won’t be so attracted to those kinds of messages?”
Ben Carson may think he has scored a point here.
What do you think?
Feature image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons License
