Right out of the gate the standard is being set pretty high—not just “pretty ballsy” or “wow, that took a pair” or even an awe-inspired “check out the onions on that guy.” Nope, the first entry headed straight for “Colbert” territory; it’s *that *ballsy.
So there’s this kerfuffle about Rick Santorum making the comment “I don’t want 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.”
There’s lots to say about the quote, but that’s fodder for a different thread. Nope, this thread is for the Ballsiest Excuse of the Year.
He was on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Bill asked him about the quote. Santorum’s entry for BEotY?
“I looked at that, and I didn’t say that. If you look at it, what I what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and then sort of buuuuu came out.”
Yes, the annual event culminates with the televised “Naddies.”
The “I love my country” won biggest balls in the “justifying infidelity” category last year (similar to the “wide stance” winning in the “justifying homosexuality” category), but the rules dictate that the date of the original offense/incident can be prior to the award year but the excuse itself must be made between Jan 1 and Dec 31.
Goddamn it, Rick Santorum is a disgusting human being. He is positively vile. Why do people on this board keep picking these fucking moronic, inaccurate excuses to attack him? This is the second one in less than 24 hours. He does not say “black people” there at all. It comes out closer to “bly people,” and he clearly goes back to say exactly what he meant, which was “people’s lives.” This is a fucking embarrassment, and people who make shit up in the interest of attacking him let him off the hook in two different ways: they ignore the real stuff and make it easier to ignore the real stuff by mixing the real stuff with fake stuff. What you get is a frothy mixture of dishonesty and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of idiocy.
“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”
“Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.”
-Rick Santorum, April 2003
Lies and distortions are unnecessary and counterproductive in discussing why this piece of garbage is unfit for any kind of elective office down to and particularly including dog catcher.
Since Santorum has (at least until the New Hampshire primary) surged to the top of the GOP polls, maybe, for the sake of efficiency, there should be a “Rick Santorum Bashing and Trashing Thread” here in the Pit. That way there’d be a convenient one-stop location for us to comment about all the stupid, asinine … and often scary things Santorum has said.
I will add that CBS’ coverage of this speech is horrendous. (The OP links to HuffPo, but they’re essentially copying the CBS story because HuffPo exists to copy news coverage that wasn’t that good in the first place.) They treat it as a definite that Santorum said “black people” even though that’s not at all definite and in context it makes little sense, since he was addressing an almost all-white crowd and referred to them as “you” right before the comment in question. Nothing in the question or answer referred to black people in any clear way. In the quote mentions the “department of public welfare” (there’s no department by that name in Iowa) and says something about Medicaid. What’s the link between Medicaid and black people? Why would only black people need manufacturing jobs? Just to make matters worse, Santorum makes the rookie mistake of giving a bad explanation of what he said: he assumes he was talking about education and talks about “Waiting for Superman,” and since that explanation sort of acknowledges he said what he is alleged to have said, it can keep the story alive. That’s a rookie mistake and I guess it’ll hasten his eventual crash landing.
I’m sorry, the nomination committee has rejected your assertion. Notice that the announcement was carefully worded to avoid any comment on the statement itself (e.g. no Romney-parsing of what he said), and notice that in other Santorum threads the committee has been fairly generous in its interpretations of other statements.
Also note that the thread title makes no mention of Santorum and explicitly notes that nominations are open to both parties.
That said, you’ve got to go Full Palin to believe his ballsy excuse. There’s a word that starts with “blaaa” and fits the context? That the cadence doesn’t pause when he gets there (it started off with a mental thought collection)? That the concept of “black people on welfare” isn’t unfortunately common–particularly among the far right? Again, the isn’t based on the egregiousness of the original statement, it’s based on the size of the balls it takes to make a particular excuse.
"If you look at it, what I what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and then sort of buuuuu came out.” There’s no sound tick of a mental ‘um’, and no sound tick of stumbling for words. Started to say what word? What word that changed to “bluu”?
Balls.
ETA: He’s talking about entitlement programs in general–that he doesn’t want to use dependency-creating handouts to lift people out of poverty; the general conservative position is that creating jobs and opportunity does that more effectively and is better in the long run. Great point, somewhat standard and not necessarily controversial.
It’s the same inherent mental expectation behind the riddle: "A man and his son are in an accident. The father died, the child is rushed to the hospital. The doctor said I can’t operate on this person; he’s my son."
Balls to say the mental slip (which itself, again, isn’t necessarily egregious except under the klieg lights of a campaign) didn’t happen.
It really, really sounds like he said black. I mean, it really does. The popular perception among white, middle-class conservatives, is that welfare recipients are (a) mostly welfare queens driving welfare cadillacs, and (b) the typical “Welfare queen” is a black single mother. As a staunch white middle-class conservative, Santorum may very well believe this himself, if only on a subconscious level. He was speaking to a room of white, middle-class conservatives and it just slipped out. If you think it sounds more like “bly” than “black”, then it’s probably because he realised that he was about to make a terrible faux pas about halfway through the word and tried to steer away from it. Still, to me at least, it sounds like he said black. It really, really does.
It doesn’t even have to go as far as Reagan’s Welfare Queen (wasn’t that a song by ABBA?). Just like the doctor riddle above it can be an ingrained assumption and mental pairing that is far below the level of overt racism (this isn’t to argue the case, just to give it the best reading possible).
If I were an adviser I don’t know what I’d tell him to say when Bill O. brings it up. My balls aren’t the size of a pickup truck, so the flat out denial and attempt to say it was just some random Tourette’s moment would be beyond me.
And again, the Naddies aren’t about the original subject, they’re about the excuse. Cruising a men’s room is one thing; claiming it was just a ‘wide stance’ is another. Philandering is one thing; saying it was due to patriotic lust is another.
It sounds like you’re saying it’s a ballsy excuse even if it’s true. That indicates a very unique understanding of the words “ballsy” and “excuse.”
Don’t care, since I said nothing about one party or another.
I envy you: unlike the rest of us, you have obviously never gotten tongue-tied while speaking. Or else you’re taking the concept of playing dumb to a level that is best left to pros like Rick Santorum. No, I don’t think there’s a word that starts “blaa” and fits there. I think he probably started to say “lives” (since he goes something like “blaay”). The problem is that he clearly doesn’t say “black.” If you want to argue that he started to say black and then went back and corrected himself and repeated the comment without saying “black,” you’re left with two other problems: how do you know he meant “black,” since it doesn’t make sense in context, and if he didn’t mean to say “black,” why should we care that he maybe said it by accident?
He wasn’t discussing welfare, though. He mentioned a “department of public welfare” - which doesn’t exist, so I’m guessing he meant the state department health and human services - and says that they were going to be penalized if they didn’t enroll enough people on Medicaid. Medicaid has nothing to do with welfare, and as far as I know, there’s no far-right trope of black people on Medicaid. And he’s talking to an audience that appears to be entirely white, but talks about how some people want to enroll more and more of “you” into state-run programs. How does that relate to black people on welfare?
Rick Santorum is a thoroughly worthless human being whose only base of support comes from bigots and who will destroy this country if elected President. If he wins any more polls I am going to buy a gun because I am literally afraid of his acolytes coming to murder or imprison me for being a gay atheist.
With my credentials firmly established re: Senator Byproduct, I will say that having watched the video, he didn’t say anything close to “black people” and this is some dumb shit to attack him on given how utterly loathsome the things he actually says are.
The gun nuts went completely crazy when Obama got elected (he’s going to take our guns, apparently). At least here in Houston, it was difficult to find 9mm ammunition for months. My friends have told me .45 ammo was also difficult to find.
I wasn’t worried about weapons being confiscated, though, and not because you’d probably have to kill every Texan to do it.
But when the likes of Rick Perry and Rick Santorum started getting major airplay, I seriously thought about getting another shotgun. Maybe they wouldn’t cause the end of the world, but I could totally see them creating a country where I’d need to defend myself with firearms.
The irony of rushing out to buy guns because a right-wing nutjob is elected was not lost on me.
