Ben Carson Would Have Won Iowa If It Weren't For That Meddling Cruz Kid

It was Sleepy Old Man Carson all along!

[contextly_sidebar id="fnDmeyCBz9jV1NILl7mpPnNdLRdOe8XA"]Ben Carson knows why he only finished fourth in the Iowa Caucuses, with a piddling 9 percent of the vote: It had nothing with his campaign style (best described as somewhere between "somnolent" and "vegetative") or with his barely there debate performances, or the fact that he'd lose a game of Jeopardy! to a bag of hammers. No it's because the Ted Cruz campaign dirty-tricked him into losing. Classic Ted Cruz!

In an interview on Tuesday's Fox & Friends, Carson explained that he knew it was all a setup, because he knows things:

"At many of the precincts, the information was disseminated that I was suspending my campaign, that I had dropped out. And anybody who was planning to vote for me was wasting their vote and therefore they should reconsider," Carson told Fox News.

When asked if he believed Cruz supporters spoke at precincts and said that Carson had dropped out, Carson replied, "Yes, some of those speakers said that, and we have also tweets and written correspondence to the same."

Carson then nodded off into his morning oatmeal, and had to be revived before continuing, explaining that when his wife went to a caucus site, a Cruz supporter was telling people that Carson had dropped out of the race. But then, after his wife corrected the record and made it clear he was still running, Carson actually won that precinct. Which almost certainly would have been the case if his wife had appeared simultaneously in every precinct to counter Cruz's lies.

Iowans really do not care for electoral shenanigans, so as a desperate bid for attention, this one isn't half bad. There's some concrete evidence that Rep. Steve King, Cruz's most prominent Iowa ally, tried to do some ratfucking -- the electoral kind, for a change -- the evening of the caucus, as seen in tweets King sent saying that Carson was about to drop out of the race:

King was citing tweets by CNN's Chris Moody reporting, accurately, that following the caucuses, Carson would not be heading to New Hampshire or South Carolina, but "home to Florida for some R&R."

Carson's campaign later clarified that the former brain surgeon was indeed heading home for a few days, because "After spending 18 consecutive days on the campaign trail, Dr. Carson needs to go home and get a fresh set of clothes," according to campaign spokesman Larry Ross. And maybe because he forgot his keys, wallet, and knowledge of foreign policy in his other pants. You know how inconvenient that can be.

[contextly_sidebar id="YwXALKKFVPtjwpaSmozR18a0w0fpZMPX"]As proof that Carson is still very much still running, if not really in the race, the Atlantic reports that he's still spending money like crazy -- more than it's taking in from donors, in fact. Thank goodness he has a virtual army of telemarketers raising money for him; the only downside is that he's spending way more money on the fundraising firms than on actual campaigning. You might almost get the impression that Carson isn't especially good at politics, just like he doesn't know anything about foreign policy, the Constitution,   history, or much of anything besides neurosurgery and Jesus.

Even so, Carson is sure of one thing: if it hadn't been for that Ted Cruz and his interference, Ben Carson would have been the one to top Donald Trump, or at least Marco Rubio:

"I got calls from several people who told me their internal intelligence said that I was going to do extraordinarily well," he told Fox News.

What Carson left unsaid there was that the "internal intelligence" people were talking about was mostly CIA radio broadcasts coming through their dental fillings.

[ CNN / TPM / NYT / Atlantic ]