Santorum pic: Jason Reed / Reuters | Chaplin pic via forgetthetalkies.com
Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the media and “smart people” for not being on the side of conservatives in a speech to the Values Voter Summit on Saturday.
“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country,” Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.“
Check the context: Rick Santorum: Conservatives Will Never Have “Smart People On Our Side” (Buzzfeed)
Um, what about poormastery?
And this:
“When it comes to conservatism libertarian types can say, oh, well you know, we don’t want to talk about social issues,” Santorum said. “Without the church and the family, there is no conservative movement, there is no basic values of America.“
Wow. Talk about black and white! (But we’ve come to extreme talk from Rick Santorum.)
UPDATE: Here’s video of Rick Santorum making the comments … He sounds far more reasonable, don’t you think?
His premise, that smart, elite people somehow don’t hold to family values is untenable in my opinion. In his mouth, ‘family values’ is code for something else. As for his claim that ‘They believe they should have the power to tell you what to do’ … well, that seems like projection.
– P
Can I put in another plug for Jonathan Haidt’s ‘The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion’? I think Mr Haidt has nailed (if not the origins but certainly) the effects of our universal moral buttons on how Republicans/Conservatives/Nats and Democrats/Liberals/Labourites see each other. A must-read!
I was grateful to find the video of Santorum’s comments. It helps me understand his tone when making his statements — maybe he was trying to be sarcastic? Or entertaining, rather than rabid?
I don’t mean to write him off as a nut job, but he’s singing to his ‘base’ making them feel ‘right’ about a kind of moral apartheid where his side is good and decent and moral (and the source of all that is good… with ‘family values’ no less) and the godless socialists/commies are never going to embrace these ‘values’ and, it’s worse folks, they want to control you!
When a skip through history shows its “conservatives” and the church who’ve used the law and social influence to control and oppress minorities. (This a generalization, I admit.)
Left to their own devices, Mr Santorum’s conservative forebears have blocked and stymied social reform every step of the way. In the US they even fought a civil war over it.
So, his “We are the ‘family values’ movement” schtick is, at the very least, implausible and one-eyed. At worst, it’s used to justify hateful violence such as the Brevik Norway massacre or the Oklahoma bombing.
– P
No