Jim Rosica
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul said a recent report claiming fellow candidate Ben Carson fabricated a story about being offered a scholarship to West Point was a “misunderstanding.”
“I think sometimes we make a mountain out of a mole hill,” Paul said.
Paul, the junior U.S. Senator from Kentucky, spoke on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”
“I didn’t graduate from college,” Paul said. “I went 2 1/2 years and then I went to medical school and I worked really hard and I’m proud of that.
“The media has skewered me for occasionally saying I had a degree in biology,” he added. “I didn’t intend to, you know, tell something that wasn’t true. I’m proud of the fact that I got out early and I don’t have a degree and went to medical schools.
“So I think sometimes we go overboard with things, trying to play gotcha.”
POLITICO originally reported on Friday, in a story since revised, that Carson – a retired pediatric neurosurgeon – had made up getting accepted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York and turning it down.
In a review later that day, the Columbia Journalism Review said POLITICO “overpromised on what they exposed,” noting that Carson “hasn’t claimed he applied to and was accepted by West Point. He’s claimed he was offered a scholarship.”
The CJR does note that “the academy foots cadets’ bills, of course, making this impossible.”
In an editor’s note, the POLITICO story now explains that “Carson said he received a ‘full scholarship’ from West Point, in writing and in public appearances over the years — but in fact he did not and there is actually no such thing as a full scholarship to the taxpayer-funded academy.”
Carson “never explicitly wrote that he had applied for admission to West Point, although that was the clear implication of his claim to have received an offer of a full scholarship, a point that POLITICO’s initial report should have made clear,” it says.
On MSNBC, Paul said Carson “is a Johns Hopkins surgeon. You think he has to — he would intentionally lie about getting a scholarship to West Point? They don’t even give scholarships ….”
Paul went on: “I might have my quibbles with him, but I don’t think it goes to his integrity … This guy is a neurosurgeon. He doesn’t need to … make up a lie about getting a scholarship. I think it’s just sort of a misunderstanding.”
