Rick Santorum: Back in Blah (and three other dumb-ass GOP blunders)

Published Jan 06 2012, 08:12 AM by Carly Carioli

Oh, Rick Santorum. We're so going to enjoy your all-too-brief sojourn as a serious presidential candidate.

RICK SANTORUM: I DIDN'T SAY BLACK PEOPLE, I SAID BLAH PEOPLE. Did Santorum really equate black folks with welfare recipients? No, no no no. You must have misunderstood. Rick Santorum would never do that. Certainly not in front of a bunch of cameras during a town hall full of white folks in Iowa, a state where less than 10 percent of welfare recipients are black. Nooooo way. I mean, we actually have the video of him saying the following words: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them other people's money." But we'll have to ignore that and just take Rick's word on this, since he went on (cough former Phoenix scribe cough) Bill O'Reilly's show and actually claimed that he didn't say "black people" -- he said "blah people." "I looked at that [video]," Santorum told the Factor, "and I didn't say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of -- blah -- came out. And people said I said black. I didn't."

Uh, dude? Yes you did:

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RICK SANTORUM: GAY IS NOT THE NEW BLACK. I MEAN, UH, BLAH. Well, gay people, think of it this way: considering what Rick Santorum thinks about black people, maybe this isn't such a bad thing. But seriously, Rick: when you have to get a public smackdown-slash-history lesson in civil rights from Fox News? Something is very, very, very, very, very wrong:

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NEWT GINGRICH TO BLACK FOLKS: WHAT SANTORUM SAID. Just in case you thought Rick Santorum was an outlier in the Republican race-baiting, welfare-is-for-black-people field . . . nope. "If the NAACP invites me," quoth the Newt yesterday in New Hampshire, "I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps." Think Progress reminds Herr Gingrich that most food stamp recipients are white. "What's more," TP adds, "an increasing number of SNAP beneficiaries actually do have jobs and receive paychecks that are the primary source of their income. Unfortunately, only 15 percent of those incomes are above the poverty line."