“Ben Carson equipped to be president? Um — probably not at this stage,” Limbaugh told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace in an interview this morning. “But any of these Republicans running would be better than Hillary or better than anything we’ve got now, so on that, based on that comparison, yes. I would vote for him if it was up to him and Hillary. Absolutely, without a doubt.”

Carson’s lack of foreign policy experience has emerged as a political weakness in the week following the terrorist attacks in Paris. One of Carson’s foreign-policy advisors, Duane Clarridge, told the New York Times that the famed neurosurgeon struggles to understand what’s going on in the Middle East. “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” Clarridge said…

Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), appearing on Fox News Sunday before the Limbaugh interview aired, agreed that a hawkish electorate would benefit him at the expense of candidates such as Carson. “I obviously am not happy about the events from last week in Paris, but I think it’s a positive development that it suddenly has cast — forced Americans to confront more carefully the issue of national security,” Rubio said. “And I hope we focus on that more, not just for political advantage, but because the world has become a very dangerous place.”