How Ben Carson’s Rhetoric Threatens the GOP

How Ben Carson’s Rhetoric Threatens the GOP - Washington Wire - WSJ
"WALLACE: You are thinking about running for president in 2016.
And I want to talk to you about that in a moment, but it has brought attention back to some of your comments as it does to any candidate potentially running for president.
You said recently that you thought that there might not actually be elections in 2016 because of widespread anarchy. 
Do you really believe that?

CARSON: Well, I hope that that’s not going to be the case, but certainly there is the potential. Because you have to recognize that we have a rapidly increasing national debt. A very unstable financial foundation.
And you have all these things going on like the ISIS crisis that could very rapidly change things that are going on in our nation.
And unless we begin to deal with these things in a comprehensive way, and in a logical way, there is no telling what could happen in just a matter of a couple of years.

For the record, I’m sympathetic to Dr. Carson’s concerns about ISIS and the debt and have written about them many times.
But for him to claim that there might not be elections in 2016 because “[t]here may be so much anarchy going on” is quite bizarre. 
Even during the Civil War presidential elections were not suspended.
And this is not the first time Dr. Carson has engaged in wild overstatements.
Earlier this year he said that America was “very much like Nazi Germany.” 
(He has also called Obamacare “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”)

This is the kind of rhetorical recklessness that convinces many Americans that Republican leaders are extreme, irresponsible, and fundamentally unserious.
These sorts of comments have an acidic effect on the reputation of a party and a movement.
Dr. Carson has no chance of winning the GOP presidential nomination. 
The danger for Republicans, however, is that if he runs for the presidency he’ll be given a rather large platform to share his musings.
And let’s be clear: Dr. Carson’s comments are evidence of a political mind that is not simply undisciplined but also fanatical. 
(It doesn’t help that when given a chance to repudiate his initial comments, he invariably defends them.) 
These are the kinds of thing one would expect to hear from the fringes of American politics.
Any political party or movement that is associated with such utterances will pay a price."