Rick Santorum didn’t deviate from his usual script in his RNC speech tonight — he assaulted single-parent families, the poor, a women’s right to choose, abortion, and, perhaps by default, any family that’s not the cookie-cutter GOP model, so, same-sex couples.
“The fact is that marriage is disappearing in places where government dependency is highest,” Santorum lamented, and, after acknowledging “heroic single mothers,” added, “but if America is going to succeed, we must stop the assault on marriage and the family.”
That assault according to Santorum is being waged by Barack Obama and the Democrats, who supposedly make the poor dependent on government — the idea being that if the government would just stop getting in the way of poor people by trying to help them they would stop being poor.
“In America we believe in freedom and the responsibility that comes with it to work hard to make that dream of reaching our God-given potential come true. We believe it because it still works. Even today. Graduate from high school, work hard, and get married before you have children and the chance you will ever be in poverty is just two percent. Yet if you don’t do these three things you’re 38 times more likely to end up in poverty!”
Santorum didn’t mention where he got his facts or which conservative think tank twisted them for him.
My grandfather, like millions of other immigrants, didn’t come here for some government guarantee of income equality or government benefits to take care of his family.
In 1923 there were no government benefits for immigrants except one: Freedom!
Under President Obama, the dream of freedom and opportunity has become a nightmare of dependency with almost half of America receiving some government benefit.
He continued:
We all know there is one key to success that has helped people overcome even the greatest of obstacles – hard work. That’s why work was the centerpiece of the bipartisan welfare reform law.
Requiring work as a condition for receiving welfare succeeded — and not just because the welfare rolls were cut in half — but because employment went way up, poverty went down and dreams were realized.
It’s a sturdy ladder to success that is built with healthy families, education and hard work.
But President Obama’s policies undermine the traditional family, weaken the education system.
And this summer he showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare.
Talking Points Memo noted:
Santorum’s central theory from the primaries — that using the federal government to promote and encourage heterosexual marriage will fix the nation’s woes — made an appearance in primetime, serving as a reminder to viewers that social conservatives still have a lot of pull in the GOP and that the party is firmly opposed to same-sex marriage rights.
…
As he did many times during the primaries, Santorum said one of America’s main problems is that “marriage is disappearing†among the poor, something he blamed on an “assault on marriage and the family.†It’s a message Mitt Romney has co-opted for his own campaign.
Esquire offered this:
“This summer he showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare,” Santorum said of President Obama. “I helped write welfare reform, and we made the law crystal-clear: No president can waive the work requirement. But as with his refusal to enforce our immigration laws, President Obama rules like he is above the law. Americans, take heed. When a president can simply give a speech, or write a memo, and change the law to do what the law says it cannot do. The United States will no longer be a Republic.”
The obvious lie about what the president has done with welfare reform aside — and it’s been debunked more than the Loch Ness Monster at this point — this is gamey, rancid stuff, one tiny baby step away from the ways militias talk, and almost nobody in this hall noticed it. And it struck me — as he went on about the “hands” he’d shaken, including the “broken ones” of special-needs children, whom he implied that the Democrats would have preferred to have been murdered at birth, which really go the biggest cheer of the night so far — that it had been a while since I mentioned what a colossal dick Rick Santorum, with all his wet-eyed piety, really is.