We recently warned that Ben Carson would have to be prepared to handle traps set by the Leftmedia. Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear to be ready to handle friendly interviews, either. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt spoke with Carson about foreign policy Wednesday, and the former neurosurgeon seemed out of his depth. He traced the roots of rage within Islam to the book of Genesis, saying, “Well, first of all, you have to recognize they go back thousands and thousands of years. Really, back to the battle between Jacob and Esau.” Hewitt countered, “But Dr. Carson, Mohammad lived in 632 AD, so it’s a 1300-1400 year old religion. How do you go back to Jacob and Esau, which are BC?” But Carson stuck to his answer. Things didn’t get any better when the subject turned to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. Carson insisted, “We need to convince them to get involved in NATO,” referring to the Baltic states that are already in NATO.

By the end of the interview, Hewitt pulled no punches. “What I worry about as a Republican, as a conservative is that because you’ve been being a great neurosurgeon all these years, you haven’t been deep into geopolitics, and that the same questions that tripped up Sarah Palin early in her campaign are going to trip you up,” Hewitt told Carson. “How are you going to navigate that? … Have you been doing geopolitics? Do you read this stuff? Do you immerse yourself in it? I mean, you wouldn’t expect me to become a neurosurgeon in a couple of years and I wouldn’t expect you to be able to access and understand and collate the information necessary to be a global strategist in a couple of years. … I mean, we’ve tried an amateur for the last six years and look what it’s gotten us.” Carson is a good conservative and seems to be a good man, but he has a lot of reading to do. The presidency isn’t an entry-level political job.