Sometimes It’s Hard Not to Say What You Think
Rick Santorum, speaking to a crowd in Sioux City on how liberals make people dependent on them by aggressively signing them up for Medicaid, said this:
I don’t want to, to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.
What’s interesting is that his speech for the most part was clear and fluent, but when he came to the part about “black people,” he hesitated and stuttered a bit, and the word “black” came out a bit slurred, almost as if he was trying damned hard not to say it but couldn’t come up with something else quickly enough without coming to a complete rhetorical stop.
Santorum later claimed, “I’m pretty confident that I didn’t say ‘black.” [I] was starting to say one word, and I sort of came up with another word and moved on and it sounded like black.“
Nope, it was pretty clearly ”black.“ It’s hard to imagine what else the word could have been. But his denial only adds to the verbal stumbling in creating the rather clear impression that he is focusing on the idea that black people mooch off of whites, that this is what he believe is the real problem, but knows that would sound racist (because it is) and so, like creationists using ”intelligent design,“ dresses it up in more respectable clothes.
Since when does Medicaid make people wards of the state?
Canada, Oz, NZ, Germany, Norway and Sweden have very aggressive “government medicine”, and this is actually a liberator for labor, letting workers focus on actually working and not worrying about how to pay their medical bills.
http://goo.gl/aIenz
Fucking conservatives are a combination of stupid or evil.
Tough to know which, really.
The US is paying $8000 *per-capita* on health care now. This is 3X Japan’s per-capita cost. We’re getting raped, and shithead conservatives like Santorum here are a large part of the problem.
“It’s hard to imagine what else the word could have been.”
Blonde. And about time someone said it, too.
Although it sounds more like “bly” to me, at least on headphones. On my computer speakers, it sounds a little like “black” but not on the headphones, and certainly not “clearly”. The reason I’m not able to accept it yet is beacause of what he says just before what you quoted, about how the government wants to make “you” entitlement-dependent. The “you” he was talking about was the audience, and I doubt there were many black people in the audience he was addressing. I doubt Santorum ever had a lot of black people in any audience he’s ever addressed. So to say “black” in that context doesn’t make sense.
Don’t get me wrong. I hate that closet-case sleaze. But I think he just got all mush-mouthed.
Okay, I take it back. I believe he may have (almost) said what he meant to say, simply because his response to the accusations have been beyond lame.