This is easily the most animated he's been in months

GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben "The Sleepy Potato" Carson was pretty busy in Colorado Thursday. In addition to his brave "softball questions only" demand for future primary debates, he also delivered a version of his stump speech at Colorado Christian University, where he offered this mind-boggling explanation of why America needs a leader who knows nothing about governing:

This nation, believe me, was designed for We The People, and around We The People, not We the Government ... Citizen-statesmen, not career politicians, that's what it was designed for. And I love it when people come up to me and say, "But-bu-bu-bu-but you've never been elected to any public office! You can't possibly know how to do anything!"

So let me tell you something: The Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic was built by professionals! [laughter, applause]

Damned if those aren't just about the stupidest goddamn words about the value of professionalism we can imagine coming from a highly trained brain surgeon -- who taught other people to do brain surgery, in addition to being the director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. And that's leaving aside the minor detail that not only was Noah's Ark fictional, it also was physically impossible.

We also like his subtle negation of the existence of any political friction in American culture, because in Ben Carson's mind, there are only two camps: Americans, who all get along, and "secular progressives," who are not real Americans but are trying to divide "us."

[contextly_sidebar id="SaaxOu6bt68pwUjZLHJeQ2GPXQlU0Hk2"]Maybe, if we read between the lines, Ben Carson's praise of amateurs and contempt for people who know what they're doing is a veiled confession that at some point after he gave up professional doctoring, he decided he might as well undergo a trepanation session, perhaps offered to him by someone he met in the green room before one of his speeches for Mannatech. Why not? The guy was nice enough, and even showed Carson how carefully he'd washed the drill. This theory would explain a heck of a lot.

We'd look forward to someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson asking Dr. Carson more about his views on the engineering of the Ark, but we have no illusions Carson would ever submit to such "gotcha" questions. Maybe someone could just show him a cartoon instead:

[CSPAN]