One of the super unfair, I-mean-really-how-dare-they questions
CNBC's debate moderators had the nerve to put to a Republican presidential candidate in Wednesday night's debate was about shilling for dodgy nutritional supplements. It went to Dr. Ben Carson, famed neurosurgeon.
QUINTANILLA: One more question. This is a company called Mannatech, a maker of nutritional supplements, with which you had a 10-year relationship. They offered claims that they could cure autism, cancer, they paid $7 million to settle a deceptive marketing lawsuit in Texas, and yet your involvement continued. Why?
CARSON: Well, that’s easy to answer. I didn’t have an involvement with them. That is total propaganda, and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.
I did a couple of speeches for them, I do speeches for other people. They were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of a relationship with them.
Do I take the product? Yes. I think it’s a good product.
Quintanilla attempted to follow up, but Carson denied all knowledge of how he came to be on Mannatech's homepage and eventually the audience booed the questioning to a halt. Gawker's Gabrielle Bluestone rounds up
a few of the reasons we might reasonably think Carson was involved with Mannatech. Like that he's said Mannatech helped to fund his endowed chair when he was at Johns Hopkins (a claim that may or may not be true, but Carson definitely said it). Or that:
... in a 2004 address to Mannatech sales associates, he claimed the company’s supplements had helped him with his prostate cancer. “Within about three weeks my symptoms went away, and I was really quite amazed,” he said in the videotaped speech. According to the Journal he told the audience he had “initially considered forgoing surgery and treating the cancer with supplements only.”
“I can’t say that that’s the reason that I feel so healthy,” Carson disclaimed in another infomercial for the company—which is literally true, legally speaking. “But I can say that it made me feel different and that’s why I continue to use it more than ten years later. The wonderful thing about a company like Mannatech is that they realize that when God made us, he gave us the right fuel. And that fuel was the right kind of healthy food.”
Gosh, why would anyone say Carson had a relationship with the company? I guess when he appeared on camera lavishing praise on Mannatech, he had no idea he was advertising it? (Video below the fold.) Or when he said the company had helped
endow his chair at Johns Hopkins, that was just a coincidence?