"Shhhhhh....I'm crazy...."
My original plan was to write about Donald Trump's possible run for president in the Independent Party, but a quick pop over to ThinkProgress.org (one of my new favorite websites - definitely bookmark it) showed me that Donald Trump's craziness can wait just a little bit longer. Rick Santorum is using the brief media spotlight of his - and his potential win tonight in the Iowa Caucus race - to amp up his inner republican.
I am going to post the entirety of the article here, and have comments of my own at the bottom. I'd write about it myself, but I have a few more of these posts to crank out tonight. Besides, the folks over at ThinkProgress.org do a wonderful job at summing this whole fiasco up - certainly better than I could.
At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” [...] It is unclear why Santorum pinpointed blacks specifically as recipients of federal aid. The original questioner asked “how do we get off this crazy train? We’ve got so much foreign influence in this country now,” adding “where do we go from here?”
It’s hard to say which part of the story is stranger — that Santorum spontaneously derided poor black people in response to a question about foreign money or his explanation of why he did it.
When asked about the comments in a CBS interview, Santorum bizarrely referenced a documentary about the education achievement gap, Waiting for Superman, to explain the context. “Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called, um, what was it? ‘Waiting for Superman,’ which was about black children and so I don’t know whether it was in response and I was talking about that,” he said. The movie actually portrays students of several races.
There had originally been some confusion about whether Santorum actually said the word “black,” which he appeared to clear up in the CBS interview by acknowledging that was in fact the statement he made. (The candidate seemed to think better of his words mid-sentence, so the line comes across garbled.)
CBS points out that only nine percent of Iowans on food stamps are black — and 84 percent are white. Nationally, 39 percent of welfare recipients are white, 37 percent are black, and 17 percent are Hispanic. So Santorum’s decision to single out black welfare recipients plays right into insulting — and inaccurate — stereotypes of the kind of people some voters might expect to want a “handout.”
Attacking families who receive government aid has been a theme among many of the Republican candidates. In nearly every speech, Newt Gingrich accuses President Obama of being a “food stamp president” and even said “really poor children” have bad work habits and no knowledge of how to make an income “unless it’s illegal.” (HT: Raw Story)
If you're like me, you're probably sitting there at your computer with your mouth hanging open wondering, "Did he really just say that?" If you don't believe it, there is a clip of him saying it on youtube. This is blatant racism. I don't care how many circles he wants to walk around it. The question had nothing to do with welfare, let alone black people, and his explanation of having just watched Waiting For Superman (a TERRIBLE "documentary," by the way) doesn't hold water either.
Big kudos to CBS for finding out those welfare statistics too. The idea that there are 8.5 white people on welfare for every one African-American in Iowa is just too funny. If you're going to try and appeal to like-minded racists, Rick, you might want to head further South. You might as well be in China complaining about Mexicans.
ThinkProgress.org Article (as quoted above)
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