Ben Carson Defended His $31,000 Dining Room Set by Throwing His Wife Under the Bus
Ben Carson, who still serves in Donald Trump's Cabinet despite the fact that he now spends most of his time thumbing through old Restoration Hardware catalogs, continued his spirited public defense of his infamous $31,000 office dining set in a congressional oversight hearing on Tuesday. This time, the culprit was not the Carson family's passion for tasteful interior design, or the government's interest in replacing antique office furniture. No, said Ben Carson. He needed a $31,000 office dining set for safety.
I was told that the dining room set needed to be changed. I said, "Why"? Because people were stuck by nails, and a chair had collapsed with someone sitting in it. It's 50 years old.
Internal HUD emails indicate that at least one official had expressed concern that a chair could collapse and cause "embarrassment" for the hypothetical victim, but no publicly-released evidence indicates that such a disaster ever occurred. Even if the secretary's guests were having their evenings (and their formalwear) ruined by ill-timed puncture wounds, though, Carson's proffered explanation fails to address why the chosen solution to this problem was a $31,000 one.
That detail came later, when Carson, claiming that he had had too much on his agenda to worry about furniture selection, smiled earnestly at the assembled panel and proceeded to throw his wife of more than four decades under the bus.
I left it with my wife. I said, "Help choose something." ... The next thing that I, quite frankly, heard about it is that this $31,000 table had been bought. I said, "What the heck is that all about?" I investigated and immediately had it cancelled. Not that we don't need the furniture, but I thought that that was excessive.
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that Carson at first opined that the cost of the table was reasonable, and that he cancelled the order only after the public excoriated him for caring more about his office's redecorating budget than he does about poor people. Why is Candy Carson choosing how to spend taxpayer dollars? And why does Ben Carson think that pointing the finger at her will absolve him of responsibility? I'm no auditor, but I am guessing that "ceding unilateral decisionmaking authority to one's spouse" does not appear in any best practices manual for stewardship of government funds.
It has been remarkable to watch this man transform over the past few years from a celebrity doctor who did silly cameos in Farrelly brothers movies to a grifting bureaucrat who is coming unglued before our eyes by his baffling inability to not fuck up the acquisition of a dining room table. I hope Ben Carson's taste in luxury furniture extends to the couch he bought for his home, because I am also reasonably confident that he's going to be sleeping on it tonight.
