Earlier this month, presidential candidate Rick Santorum went into a church and publicly lied through his teeth. This wasn’t some momentary hyperbole during a campaign speech, or while arguing with another candidate. The event was a forum at the Grace Bible Church moderated by Dr. James Dobson, the founder of the conservative group Focus on the Family (who has endorsed Santorum).
I had heard about this, but until I saw the video I didn’t realize how calmly and deliberately he had lied:
The conservative Annenberg Public Policy Center fact checked Santorum’s statements, and found them to be completely false.
Needless to say, the Dutch are pretty upset about this, one article saying that Santorum’s comments “would be a laughing matter, if he weren’t in the race for the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama in the race for the presidency of the most powerful country in the world.”
Santorum has so far refused to clarify his statements, but instead is doubling down by attacking education. After all, who needs facts when a crazy lie will do just as well?
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In case anyone cares, here is the quote from Obama that Santorum is making fun of in the last sentence of the post:
“We’re not going to stop fighting to give our kids a world-class education, to make college more affordable, to make sure that by 2020 we have the highest rate of college attendance of any country in the world. So we proposed that graduates should only pay 10 percent of their income to pay back their student loans. Students like that. And what I’ve said is we’ll forgive student loan debt after 20 years — but after 10 if you choose a career in public service. Because if you decide you want to be a teacher — if you decide you want to be a cop, if you’re not making huge amounts of money we don’t want to discourage you from that because of the cost of college. And by the way, I’ve been there and Michelle has been there — it took us 10 full years to pay off Michelle’s student loans, 15 to pay mine off. So I’ve been there. And our belief, and I think your belief, is in the United States of America nobody should go broke because they chose to go to college. We want everybody to go to college, and we don’t want them going broke doing it.”
..Well, i’m Dutch and i live in the Netherlands. And can take some doubt away by stating ‘YES!’ that IS what is commonly referred to as: a Liar.
..And what he stated in the debate is absolutely bull-shit and should be treated so.