(May 26) Rick Santorum could teach CNN a lot about honor, decency, and American history.
The aggressively liberal cable news network last weekend terminated the punditry contract of Santorum, the conservative Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, in response to inartful comments Santorum made about Native Americans in an April speech. Yet Santorum’s comments, made as an ad-libbed aside and without malice, were far less objectionable than was CNN’s handling of the matter.
Santorum’s comments came in a quick aside in an hourlong speech to a conservative student group, the Young America’s Foundation. While introducing what once was the uncontroversial notion that the United States was the first nation created as such on the basis of ideas and principles, he said, “We birthed a nation from nothing; I mean there was nothing here.” Then, realizing that the statement was too expansive in seeming to ignore a native people altogether, he added: “I mean, yes, we had Native Americans, but, candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
And then he went back to talking about the importance of religious liberty, a new concept in the West at that time.
To anyone with half a brain who listened to the long lead-up to that statement and the following words of Santorum’s speech, it was obvious that he was specifically discussing the American political culture, rooted in the concept of natural rights, that resulted in the founding of a new nation. The somewhat relevant but debatable influence of the native Iroquois Confederacy aside, Santorum’s statement as amended by that one word “political” would have been accurate even if badly expressed.
Either way, his point was not to belittle Native Americans but to talk about the role of religious liberty and natural rights in the nation’s founding. As Santorum readily acknowledged on CNN when host Chris Cuomo was lecturing/bullying him, he “misspoke” when he said “culture” instead of the “founding.”…
[The full column is at this link.]
