It’s one thing to be comically oblivious to world affairs, and to prove this to be the case day after day on national television. It’s one thing to claim (incorrectly) that China is conducting military operations in Syria, and it’s one thing to be unable to name a single Middle Eastern country that you would call on to form a coalition against the Islamic State.

But it’s another thing entirely to have all of these charges levied against you by your own campaign in the New York Times, which is exactly what just happened.

From the Times:

“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security, said in an interview. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so “we can make him smart.”

That would be a pretty scorching burn if it came from one of Carson’s opponents. That it’s coming from his own campaign is positively brutal.

The report also highlights Carson’s willingness to take small bits of narrative-confirming information and run with them — a familiar theme for Carson:

This week, Mr. Carson’s advisers said that his source for claiming Chinese involvement in Syria was a telephone conversation he had had with a freelance American intelligence operative in Iraq. According to notes of the briefing kept by a Carson aide who was also on the line, the operative had said, “Multiple reports have surfaced that Chinese military advisers are on the ground in Syria, operating with Russian special operations personnel.” Mr. Clarridge, a former C.I.A. agent who had connected Mr. Carson with the operative in Iraq, said on Monday that the information was wrong. The operative in Iraq had “overleaped” in suggesting Chinese troops are in Syria, Mr. Clarridge said, adding of the operative, “You know how it goes when people are desperate for some headline.”

Seriously. When the Washington Post initially asked Carson’s campaign where he had heard the “China in Syria” claim, the campaign sent them three links. “Desperate for some headline” doesn’t even come close to how unreliable the sources were.

For his part, Clarridge was indicted and then pardoned for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal. He has been operating a private intelligence firm ever since. When Ben Carson and his campaign said that they had sources “on the ground” in Syria that the Obama administration didn’t have, they were talking about Clarridge’s firm. Yikes.

Again, this doesn’t tell us anything new about Carson’s complete lack of knowledge about global affairs, and I was already under the impression that something really isn’t quite right with the guy. But the fact that his own campaign is going to the New York Times to unload — presumably to light a fire under Carson’s ass in order to get him to study harder, but who knows? — is really strange. Even for him.