I think Santorum is one of those racists who finds the n-word unacceptable. He did say, “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; And provide for themselves and their family.”
That’s “black,” not “blaggghhh,” or whatever he’d like us to believe he said.
We all know Santorum’s just an ignorant crac–, uh, bigoted moron
Oh John, please don’t try that.
Here’s the video of the full 70 minute speech, with the stumble at 34:30. It’s a video hosted by JATV, Janesville Wisconsin’s public access network. 1080p is available. Pretty good video, really. His lips appear well synched to the audio. (And thank you for making me look closely at Santorum’s lips.)
Whether or not he was going to say nigger, the stumble is undeniably there. If you’re going to claim that someone at a podunk public access channel deliberately (and skillfully) edited the video to include a stumble (without asking why they wouldn’t just out and out make him say nigger if they were that good), I think it’s safe to say you’re too paranoid to trust anything online, which makes discussion nearly impossible.
No. The ‘black’ comment was real but that just sounded like gibberish.
Somehow I’m thinking that if he had just copped to the “blah people” comment and admitted he said blacks, but apologized and said it was just a reflexive verbal tic, people would be more forgiving of his latest blunder. As it is now, every stutter, verbal glitch, anomaly, or pause in his speech is going to be looked over with a fine-toothed comb, and god help him if any of them start with “ni-” or “bla-”. He brought this on himself, either by being racist, or saying racist things but denying he said them
Is Dick Armey an uneducated redneck? If he let “Barney Fag” slip, why couldn’t Santorum have almost let nigger slip?
My question is, if he meant to say negotiator or something, why didn’t he go back and say that word? Why was his clarification completely different from what he was saying before?
It couldn’t have been because he didn’t mean to say anything at all, as the sentence doesn’t make sense without some word there. And if he meant to say “governmentnik,” it would seem odd that he didn’t replace it with something that would mean the same thing.
The only explanation besides it being a word he didn’t want to say is if it were a teleprompter and he couldn’t go back and see what that word was.
I’m going to go with “because they’re different people” for $100.
I’m not trying anything. From the audio clip in the OP it sounded doctored to me. It doesn’t sound natural.
I’ll take your word for it, rather than listen to 70 minutes of Santorum speaking. (or 34 minutes even).
Ok, you are entitled to your opinion on what he intended to say, but there is not doubt whatsoever that, had he meant n*gger (I bow to the convention of disguised spelling), it would make perfect linguistic sense.
Imagine if he said, “… the ant-war government guy (or man, or idiot, or any of a thousand other nouns)”. In terms of language and grammar both, it is a completely acceptable if not terribly sophisticated phraseology.
You don’t have too, the link is edited to start maybe 10 seconds before the “slip”. However, if you wanted to, you could push the slider bar back to watch the speech from the start.
There is not any least glitch in the video to suggest tampering.
It’s YouTube. You can skip straight to the part you want to hear. In fact, the provided link skips straight to it for you.
Edit: Ninjaed by Boyo Jim!
Well, well – Kimstu, in the Stupid Republican… Pit thread, has collected a number of usages of “government n*****r” for us to contemplate.
In light of that, and a number of posts in this thread, I’m changing my tentative opinion from “innocent tongue-tangle” to “hmmmmmmmmmmm…”
(snipped)
I dunno - he’s Virginia, WVa and Pennsylvania, right? Those are all pretty damn southern and/or redneck. I can easily see people my age or older from conservative areas who have *never *had the experience of a black person in a direct position of power over them.
As a totally unscientific comparison, my foster sister and I are in our early 30s - she went to middle and high school in WVa, and I was in SC. She never had a single black teacher in WVa, and doesn’t remember there being any at all - according to her: “black teachers were only in primary schools - once you got to middle and high school, the teachers were nearly totally segregated out by the way the school districts were divided.”
She says that it was widely ‘known’ (in quotes because common knowledge yadda yadda) by the students and families that the administration wouldn’t put white lady teachers into the “black schools” because they would 1) be in danger, and 2) be unable to keep order, so all of the black teachers ended up there instead.
I had the same experience in a rural SC high school. About 1/2 the school student population was black, but the ONLY ‘black’ teacher I can recall in the entire school was actually a mulatto from Trinidad on a visa who taught French and Spanish. On the other hand, over at the reform school where I tutored for extra credit, I remember that the only adult white people were the counseling staff.
I don’t know whether Santorum meant to say governmentnik or government n*, but I totally wouldn’t put it past a very socially conservative male from the south to have that word on call - even if he never uses it socially, it could very easily be part of his vocabulary with his intimates. And I do know that Santorum is a really sloppy speaker - he seems to go off-line fairly regularly, and weird garble ensues. If I were his wranglers, I would seriously consider tasing his ass anytime he said something that wasn’t teleprompted.
However, I’m not, so instead I fervently hope they don’t, and he says something truly awful that gets him knocked out of the race.
To me this looks like a duck and quacks like a duck: it sounds like he is about to say n*gger, why would we make up all kinds of explanations for him?
Governmentnik? Really? That’s the kind of thing you think about saying before hand, you chuckle to yourself when you come up with it, you consider how you might use it in a sentence. Then when the time comes to use your clever new joke, you don’t bungle it and start talking about something else.
Negotiator? Same thing, if that was the point he was going to make, then why did he give up? It’s not plausible, and seems like just reaching for anything to excuse him.
Why come up with such complicated excuses for Santorum. No doubt he can explain it all perfectly well himself, but until he does Occam’s Razor says he was going for “anti-war government n*gger”, which, as others have pointed out, makes at least some sense (in Racist World) to say.
Blegh.
If you played that video for me with no context, and I had no idea who was speaking and asked me what I thought he said, I’d say it sounds like he’s almost calling Obama a n*gger but stops himself midway.
But, it doesn’t jib with my perception of Santorum, and though I have zero good feelings for the guy, he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who just throws that word around.
In the end, though, it’s just ambiguous enough that some people will see it as proof that all republicans are racist, and others will see it as proof that people are always attempting to unfairly tar republicans as racist. Which is pretty much the status quo, anyway.
OTOH he has a well-known history of saying outrageous and offensive things without stutters, and trying to take them back over the following days, often by explaining it in a way that is completely belied by the context in which he made the original comment.
I had no idea that “government nigger” was a right wing catch phrase. With that being established in the link, it is now very clear that is what he was almost going to say in that context.
I think he called Obama a “government ninja,” probably a reference to aspects of his training as a CIA Martian chrononaut. (Alternatively, Santorum is trying to get the word out that Obama’s Kenyan citizenship is just a blind, and he is really Japanese.)
The syntax makes plenty of sense.
Compare:
“He’s an antiwar government n****r.”
“He’s a cowardly welfare mooch.”
For those of you who think this was completely innocent, and can’t figure out what he was about to say, here’s the key thing for you to know:
This wasn’t an accident. This was a political “dog whistle.” What is a dog whistle? It’s a whistle that blows at a sound frequency outside the range of normal human hearing.
Similarly, a political “dog whistle” is a kind of rhetoric that speaks to an unpopular constituency a politician wants votes from, but can’t openly solicit. The politician therefore speaks in a kind of “code” that the constituency will understand, but that most other voters won’t hear as an appeal to that constituency. Both sides do it. The Republicans have been doing it with racist voters for decades now.
Here’s what you, as a presumably decent person, should dislike the most about Republican racist dog whistling: it depends on people like you to work. Conservative racists got Santorum’s message just fine. Your unwillingness to admit that 1) racism is still a problem in America, and 2) it is concentrated most heavily on the right wing of American politics, is the sort of denial Republicans exploit to win the votes of racist scum without taking a political hit for it.