You know, when you’re a politician, you can throw around this kind of self-serving hyperbole and nobody will call you on it because, frankly, everyone expects you to lie. But when you start writing a column for the newspaper, you can’t just pull shit out of your ass and state it as fact. From paragraph two of Rick Santorum’s Elephant In The Room column in the Inquirer:
Along with churches and families, government has played a role in, at first, nurturing – and, more recently, weakening – this social compact. One of my greatest frustrations as a Republican leader was trying to persuade my colleagues that government can help cultivate this social bond. I won that argument, in part, when I helped pass two of the most successful antipoverty bills in history, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and the American Community Renewal Act.
Really? Wait until the New Deal hears about this! Roll over FDR and tell Lyndon Johnson the news! And really, Mr. Santorum, are you the best person to be scolding the federal government for underserving the poor, when your own charity was rated as positively miserly, not to mention dreadfully inefficient if not flat-out corrupt, by the Better Business Bureau? From the Associated Press:
Sen. Rick Santorum’s charity donated about 40 percent of the $1.25 million it spent during a four-year period, well below Better Business Bureau standards paying out the rest for overhead,
including several hundred thousand dollars to campaign aides on the charity payroll.
The charity, Operation Good Neighbor, is described on its Web site as an organization promoting “compassionate conservatism” by providing grants to small nonprofit groups, many of them religious.The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance says charitable organizations should spend at least 65 percent of their total expenses on program activities.
Operation Good Neighbor is based at the same address as Pennsylvania Sen. Santorum’s campaign office in suburban Philadelphia, and some of the same people who have worked on his campaign are working for his charity and collecting money from it, records show. [via MEDIA MATTERS]