QOTD: Ben Carson
by digby
On Fox News:
Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect. There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it.
There should be no rules for war. I wonder if he thinks it would be a good idea to try to find a final solution for Islamic extremism? Somebody once tried to do that to another group and got pretty far with it. They too thought there were no rules. Civilized, mature societies believed that was unacceptable and immoral, even in war and they prosecuted those people for war crimes (also known as "rules".)
I guess he thinks the people who won WWII were a bunch of panty waists who learned nothing of value from the two horrific world wars that killed hundreds of millions of people. They saw the results of that kind of thinking --- some of the carnage due to their own actions --- and they tried to build a more civilized world, with admittedly mixed success. It's not as if we've been entirely peaceful but we have attempted to evolve into something more decent than the idea that war requires that everyone unleash the beast. That way lies genocide and nuclear annihilation.
Sometimes I think Dr Ben Carson was so busy being a hard-working medical student and neurosurgeon that he didn't actually read anything but medical books in his entire life until the last couple of years. And I'm not sure what he's reading today but he sounds like a high school senior who just discovered Ayn Rand. It's bizarre. He's a very smart guy, obviously. But he's an extremely puerile political thinker even for a right winger.