The legacy media is running a story claiming that Rick Santorum, taking questions at a campaign event, said “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” The story apparently began with NPR.
The first thing I want to note is there is nothing inherently offensive in this statement (unless you are so liberal that you’re offended by the idea of not redistributing wealth). What might make this offensive would be if he had brought it up outside the context of inter-racial redistribution of wealth, in which case it could be race-baiting. That’s the allegation in this case.
But he never said it. Here’s the video:
He said “I don’t want to make [unintelligible] people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” It’s not clear to me what he did say; I’m getting “lah”. Tommy Christopher renders it “mmbligh”. Ed Morrissey renders it “lives”. But one thing he clearly did not say is “black” — there is no K sound.
The story gets muddier with an interview Santorum gave to CBS News. They asked him about the statement, but they didn’t play the context. So what is Santorum to answer?
- He can’t explain why he said it, because he doesn’t remember saying it, because he didn’t say it.
- He can’t deny it and tell them what he did say, because he doesn’t know, because they didn’t play him the context.
- He can’t deny it and tell them he would never say such a thing, because (as above) there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It’s only wrong in context, and they didn’t play him the context.
So in this situation, all he can do is say something like what he said “I’ve seen that quote, I haven’t seen the context in which that was made”. He then guessed (incorrectly) at what the context might have been:
Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called . . . ‘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.
NPR acted shabbily by putting words in Santorum’s mouth; if you can’t tell, don’t guess. (Although perhaps the reporter really did hear “black”, which — being completely out of context — would tell us a lot more about him than about Santorum.) CBS acted shabbily by ambushing him with the question and not giving him the information to answer. Santorum made a political blunder by guessing.
But worst is where the blogospheric left took the story from there:
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.
That’s simply a lie. Santorum did not confirm making the statement.
Finally, I can’t help but observe how disingenuous it is for the left to pretend shock and amazement at race baiting (which, at the risk of repeating myself, Santorum didn’t do), when their response to every single criticism of this administration is to accuse the critics of racism (for example).
Internet Scofflaw 