Conservative darling and potential 2016 presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson on Thursday told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the nation should find a way to “get rid of the IRS.”
Carson kicked off his speech with a joke acknowledging that he’d recently been placed on, then taken off, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-gay “extremists.”
“If you’re black, and you oppose the progressive agenda, and you’re pro-life, and you’re pro-family, they don’t know what to call you,” he said, “you end up on some kind of watch list for extremists.”
The former neurosurgeon then turned to politics proper, asking, “How do we use the incredible brains God gave to recognize when things don’t work?”
Without delving into many specifics, Carson described his vision of a country that “puts our Constitution on the top shelf — and for those who have any doubt, that includes the Second Amendment.”
He ticked off his support for a list of conservative causes, from balancing the budget to “school choice” to combating “radical Islamic terror” — and needled Democrats for raising issues with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled address to Congress next month.
After saying that Iran, currently in nuclear negotiations with the U.S., is possibly an even graver threat than the Islamic State terror group, he noted, “we have friends over there.”
“Let’s not turn our back on Israel,” he said. “Let’s listen to Netanyahu.”
The audience offered Carson big applause when he envisioned “a fair taxation system that allows us to get rid of the IRS.”
Carson also echoed President Barack Obama when he said that conservatives needed to shake their families out of complacency and get out the vote in 2016.
“We need to talk to our uncle that hasn’t voted in 20 years,” Carson said.
During his 2008 campaign, Obama regularly delivered a similar line about a “Cousin Pookie.”
“If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics,” then-Sen. Obama said.
