Commenter lamh finds Santorum talking about the need to stop giving money to black people:
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” Santorum begins. “I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”
Only about a third of welfare recipients are African-American. That’s the reality. (And it’s also worth noting that African-Americans get a disproportionately low proportion of Social Security pay-outs, because of lower life expectancies and average wages.)
I hate that American politics has been dominated by the specter of imaginary strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks with their welfare checks. It’s what I hate the very most about American politics, because it’s so incredibly toxic in so many ways: it’s divisive and hateful, it turns the middle-class against itself, it makes a rational discussion of the role of government impossible, it holds us back as a society more than any other myth I can think of.
So you’ll have to excuse me for not wanting to participate in all the navel-gazing about what liberals “should” think about Ron Paul. The guy has flirted with strapping young buck racism (as well as anti-Semitism) since forever, not just via his (ghostwritten) newsletter but also in his (presumably not entirely ghostwritten) book. His economic ideas would—in my opinion—probably devastate the American middle class.
For a liberal like me, who is primarily interested in the well-being of the American middle-class and in providing opportunity for everyone in the United States, regardless of race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion etc., I just don’t see why I should be “challenged” by Ron Paul. I understand that if you’re a liberal who is primarily interested in civil liberties and a less bellicose foreign policy, then you might be conflicted about Paul. But to me, he’s just another racist asshole who wants to fuck the American middle-class.
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