Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), a man previously made famous for his belief that an island could somehow capsize and tip over and who once lamented that his greatest fear involving budget cuts was to experience a “world without balloons,” claims that retired neurosurgeon and conservative presidential hopeful Ben Carson is an African-American trying to gain support from the ignorant.
Appearing on the Michael Smerconish Show, where the subject was race relations under Obama, Johnson said that the president has done “as much as is humanly possible” to bring the races together. The comments come remarkably enough on the heels of a new Bloomberg poll that found that 45% of Americans say race relations have gotten worse since the election of Obama, while only 15% say they’ve gotten better.
He added, for good measure, that Obama is probably the greatest president our nation has ever seen.
The problem, Johnson contends, is ignorant black men like Carson and his supporters, who act “like a lynch mob” toward the president.
Via Mediaite:
Part of the problem, the congressman said, is that now “we have African Americans trying to tap into that vein of ignorance.” As his prime example, Johnson cited Carson:
[He] is a very smart, well-educated man and knows exactly what he’s doing, when we have blacks like that trying to tap into the ignorance of people who have been whipped into a frenzy, like a lynch mob, and you go to try to garner support from those folks, I think it’s very disappointing that we would have that kind of political discourse going on in this country.
He added that Carson is “appealing to the lowest common denominator.”
Take a listen to Johnson’s comments below:
Cross-posted at the Mental Recession
