This has been one of the most shameful weeks in the history of American media, and that covers a lot of waterfront. The scurrilous and obviously false attacks by POLITICO were only the worse. CNN dispatched people to try to find Carson’s 8th grade classmates to verify their memory of… wait for it… Carson’s memory. I have no idea how that works. I can give you dozens of examples from my own life, much closer to the present day than to a 13 year old Carson, where my memory of events is either lacking or is significantly different from those of other participants. Instead of viewing shadows on the wall in Plato’s cave, the media is trying to convince us that the memory of a teenage boy is not only fixed in stone but that if anyone else disagrees with that memory, well, you know who is lying.

Why? ABC’s Matthew Dowd tells us

Ben Carson’s greatest strength in gop race was authenticity and trustworthiness. if that begins to fracture he will drop like a rock.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) November 6, 2015

There is a difference, that is apparently lost on Dowd and his colleagues between vetting and undertaking a jihad to demolish a candidate. The refusal to give Carson even a small benefit of a doubt on events of 50 years ago contrast sharply with the media slavishly going along with Hillary Clinton’s bizarre and self-contradictory stories about her grotesque mishandling of classified information and about her role in Benghazi.

Recently there was another candidate for president whose only qualification was a compelling life story. His name was Barack Obama. He may very well have been the first man ever to have written a memoir without having actually accomplished anything.

Obama claims to have attended an elite private prep school in Hawaii. Have we seen his application (which is much closer to the present day than Carson’s meeting with General Westmoreland) or do we know how he paid for it?

Obama applied and was admitted to Occidental College under the name Barry Sotero. Why? Has anyone seen his application? Has anyone seen his grades. (I only mention grades because of the furor the media went into over trying to get George Bush’s transcript.)

Obama attended the private Coumbia College of Columbia University and later Harvard University. How did he pay for that schooling? Has anyone seen any documentation.

Did he only register for Selective Service in 1980?

Was Obama’s mother actually featured in pornography?

And on and on and on. In short, virtually nothing in any of Obama’s memoirs has been “vetted” and when bizarre stuff shows up, like his personal and financial ties with convicted terrorists no one shows any interest. 

What the media just doesn’t get is the idea that vetting is only vetting when it is done to everyone and it is done with a modicum of commonsense. What is being done to Ben Carson is a shallow and transparent attempt to torpedo his campaign and if they have to lie to do it, like CNN and POLITICO, they are happy to do so. The shameful attacks on Ben Carson this week have no excuse outside casual racism excited in liberals when an accomplished black man has the temerity to disagree with the progressive catechism. Like this from a pudgy, white douchebag named David Waldman who is affiliated with Daily Kos

@owillis And then the professor said I was the most honestest one in the whole class and she gived me ten dollarses. — David Waldman (@KagroX) November 7, 2015