While campaigning in Iowa on Sunday, Carson complained that people aren’t listening to his ideas on fighting ISIS. “They say, ‘Carson doesn’t know anything about foreign affairs.’ And yet everybody picks up on all the stuff I say, including President Obama, and start using it themselves.” What bold ideas is he talking about? Carson later elaborated: “In [Obama’s] case, he was talking in a press conference about taking their land and making them look like losers. Almost the exact words that I used.”
Obama did say in a press conference this weekend,“We will take back land that [ISIS] are currently in.” But, obviously, that is not new. (The U.S. has been working with Iraqis to expel ISIS for years.) And Obama called ISIS “a bunch of killers with good social media.” But the losers thing is just not in the transcript.
“Losers” does sound familiar though, doesn’t it? In the most recent GOP debate, The Guardian noted, Carson’s words “strongly echoed” Donald Trump’s. He cribbed from Trump’s oil obsession, saying we should take “a big energy field” away from ISIS. “We have to say, how do we make them look like losers?” Carson said. “And I think the way to make them look like losers, we have to destroy their caliphate.” When people lose they often look like losers. Any minute now Carson will present his big ideas for how to do that.