Ben Carson is not an idiot. He’s not stupid. He’s not even a fool. He’s wrong, sometimes as wrong as you can be, and he is incredibly unqualified to be President, but he is not an idiot. He can’t be. He was a neurosurgeon, though that barely explains it.  Because Ben Carson was a neurosurgeon like John Coltrane was a saxophone player or Jimi Hendrix a guitar player. Like Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player or Rembrandt a painter.  He was one of those guys who was so brilliant at what he did it does not even seem real. He was what Einstein was to physics or Chomsky to linguistics. He was the Leonardo Da Vinci. In fact in all likelihood he was much better by several degrees of magnitude at what he did than anything you will ever be able to do no matter how hard you try. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the entire history of medicine. A thousand years from now they will speak of Dr. Ben Carson’s surgical feats with awe.

So he’s not stupid. Best not to pretend he is. And he is definitely an egomaniac. But when you are that good you are allowed to be an egomaniac. In fact you are allowed to be anything, anything except president. Because he’d be an awful president. But not even that detracts from his brilliance.

The point of all this being that when we criticize Ben Carson by calling him stupid, all we’re doing is looking stupid ourselves. Let’s not fall into that trap. Like the trap Ben Carson has fallen into thinking that a genius is a genius at everything. They aren’t. A genius can be just as dumb as anyone else at something they’re not good at.

Dr. Ben Carson in the operating room.