Ben Carson's Past Faces Deeper Questions (VIDEO)

Carson's getting the Herman Cain treatment, and it's harsh.

Enormous coverage at Memeorandum, "Exclusive: Carson claimed West Point ‘scholarship’ but never applied."

And at the Wall Street Journal, "In harsh light of presidential politics, parts of his inspirational biography are questioned":

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, Ben Carson’s black classmates unleashed their anger and grief on white students who were a minority at Detroit’s Southwestern High.

Mr. Carson, then a junior with a key to a biology lab where he worked part time, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he protected a few white students from the attacks by hiding them there.

It is a dramatic account of courage and kindness, and it couldn’t be confirmed in interviews with a half-dozen of Mr. Carson’s classmates and his high school physics teacher. The students all remembered the riot. None recalled hearing about white students hiding in the biology lab, and Mr. Carson couldn’t remember any names of those he sheltered.

“It may have happened, but I didn’t see it myself or hear about it,” said Gregory Vartanian, a white classmate of Mr. Carson’s who served in the ROTC with Mr. Carson and is now a retired U.S. Marshal.

Mr. Carson’s biography, a rise from poverty to become a top neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University, is central to his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Now, his story—told in nine books and countless inspirational speeches over the past 25 years—has come under the harsh scrutiny of presidential politics, where rivals and media hunt for embellishments and omissions that can hobble a campaign.

In 2008, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton said she was mistaken when she claimed she and her daughter, Chelsea, had come under sniper fire and had to run for cover during a trip to Bosnia in 1996 while she was first lady. A video of the trip unearthed after her comments showed no gunfire.

The threat to the Carson candidacy is that the inconsistencies or hard-to-check anecdotes, which were told long before he ever considered a presidential run, will put off voters only now getting to know him.

Mr. Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, said Friday there was “no evidence” that any aspect of Mr. Carson’s biography wasn’t true. “There’s no facts saying they are not true. We are guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “You have no reason to believe that they are not true. There’s no evidence to point to the fact that they are even questionable.”

Still more.

Let's see how long he can hold out.