A nifty catch by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. And yes, it still feels weird days later that Carson and his defenders like me are eager to prove that he really did assault someone with a knife as a child rather than that he didn’t. He may have had a murderous temper, but darn it, the man’s not a liar.

He tried to gut a guy according to his own mother. Take that, media.

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/663518863145963520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

So, along with Politico’s West Point fiasco, that’s two popular “Carson lied” stories in the span of three days essentially debunked. I hope he doesn’t think he’s out of the woods, though: Having built a new narrative that Carson’s a serial liar about his past, the media’s not going to discard it just because one or two bits of evidence don’t check out. They’re going to try to build this jenga tower faster than he can pull pieces from the bottom:

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, Ben Carson’s black classmates unleashed their anger and grief on white students who were a minority at Detroit’s Southwestern High.

Mr. Carson, then a junior with a key to a biology lab where he worked part time, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he protected a few white students from the attacks by hiding them there.

It is a dramatic account of courage and kindness, and it couldn’t be confirmed in interviews with a half-dozen of Mr. Carson’s classmates and his high school physics teacher. The students all remembered the riot. None recalled hearing about white students hiding in the biology lab, and Mr. Carson couldn’t remember any names of those he sheltered…

Last month, Mr. Carson said in a radio interview that, as a young doctor, he had a gun stuck in his ribs at a Popeye’s restaurant in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins University. “A guy comes in and puts a gun in my ribs. And I just said, ‘I believe that you want the guy behind the counter,’” Mr. Carson said. “He said, ‘Oh, okay.’” The Baltimore Police Department later said it couldn’t find a report matching the incident Mr. Carson described.

Don’t forget his answer about Mannatech at the debate either, claiming to have had no involvement with the company even though he appeared in videos they produced and praised them. (“The wonderful thing about a company like Mannatech is that they recognize that when God made us, He gave us the right fuel.”) I think the two botched hits on him over the stabbing and West Point are going to deafen voters’ ears to other allegations, though, especially with Carson shrewdly attacking the media this week as being out to get him because they’re “secular progressives” and feel threatened by him. No other Republican candidate will dare hit him on this for fear of being seen as an ally of the media — except Trump, who thinks he can get away with it because (a) he’s even more of a media-bashing outsider than Carson is and (b) he gets away with everything. Is he right about that? Watch the clip below, via Raw Story, of him commenting on Carson yesterday on “State of the Union.” Interestingly, he doesn’t push too hard on the claim that Carson’s a liar; maybe even Trump is anxious about backing up Politico with Republicans as angry as they are. Instead he hits Carson for having some sort of “pathological disease” that spurred him to behave violently in his youth. That’ll work on Iowans, no?

Exit quotation from Carson, replying to Trump: “What does it say about people who immediately jump on the bandwagon when they hear something bad rather than waiting and finding out what the truth is?… I would not be anxious to have a Commander-in-Chief who acts like that.”