Ben Carson spoke yesterday with Fox News pundit Todd Starnes about the debacle in Iowa on Monday when Carson’s campaign announced, just before Republican caucus-goers started casting their votes, that the candidate would be traveling from Iowa to his Florida home rather than directly to another early primary state like New Hampshire or South Carolina.
The campaign immediately insisted that Carson was only making the Florida stop in order to get “a fresh set of clothes” and that he wasn’t dropping out of the race. However, Ted Cruz’s campaign seized on the news to urge its supporters to tell Carson backers at caucus sites, falsely, that the neurosurgeon was leaving the race and that they should vote for Cruz instead.
While this latest controversy seemed like the latest misstep in a presidential campaign already ridden by infighting and accusations of scamming donors, not to mention the candidate’s own bizarre rantings, Carson is now trying to use it to attack Cruz, suggesting that the Texas senator is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Carson told Starnes that Cruz’s indifference to his campaign’s alleged dirty tricks was reminiscent of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the 2012 Benghazi attack. “It’s sort of like if Hillary Clinton said after Benghazi, ‘What difference does it make?’” he said. (Clinton was not talking about the terrorist attack, as Carson implied, but was responding to GOP criticisms of the administration’s talking points following the attack).
Carson went on to note that he wasn’t comparing Cruz’s actions to Benghazi, but was merely saying that he demonstrated “the same kind of attitude, the attitude being, ‘It’s water under the bridge, it’s gone by, let’s not deal with it.’”
Carson also addressed his post-Iowa trip to his Florida home.
He told Starnes that he did indeed get a fresh change of clothes rather than buy new ones and “just throw away the clothes that needed to be dry cleaned or washed,” proving that he would make a fiscally conservative president who wouldn’t “go out and spend the taxpayers’ money willy-nilly.”
We hate to have to point out to Carson that a trip to a dry cleaner in New Hampshire would likely have cost far less money than a plane ticket to Florida and would have prevented this whole commotion in the first place.
