WASHINGTON -- As the black conservative who led the presidential race about this time four years ago, Atlanta radio host Herman Cain has some perspective on what Ben Carson is going through these days.
They also share the same foe: The news media, and particularly Politico. It was the obsessively read Washington outlet that first broke the stories of Cain's alleged harassment of women at the National Restaurant Association, creating a fast-moving firestorm that led to Cain's departure from the race in December of 2011.
Now it is Carson defending himself against a Politico story claiming he was misleading about a supposed scholarship offer from West Point as a young man. Politico yanked "fabricated" from a headline, but it did find that Carson's assertion that he was "offered a scholarship" to the school could not be true. It was more like a suggestion that he could have gotten in if he had applied -- which Carson did not.
As Cain told The Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy in a story out this week:
"Clearly Ben Carson did not lie," Cain said. "Politico lied because they said he fabricated a story, when in fact, they fabricated a headline. At this point I think that Ben is winning this round."
Cain went on further about the tests for black conservatives:
Cain accused the media, many of whom he said are "liberal vultures," of trying to destroy Carson—and predicted that Sen. Marco Rubio will be next.
But he reserved his strongest criticism for Politico alone. "Too many people believe they are a credible news source when they are not," he said. "As a friend of mine told me, "If Politico says that your mother loves you, duck, because she might be shooting at you instead."
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