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.” He also said the Native American contribution to parts of our overall culture was “huge” and, rightly if belatedly, that “the way that we treated Native Americans was horrific.” It was a good-natured, generous-spirited admission of error and explanation, entirely legitimate, about what he had been trying to say.
CNN booted Santorum anyway because it doesn’t matter what you mean anymore — it only matters if someone might decide to take offense.
It is hard to know where to begin in discussing the egregious behavior of CNN here, and of the activist Left that agitated for Santorum’s ouster. To start with, my colleague Becket Adams deftly dissected the outlandishness of letting an ethical Lilliputian such as Cuomo, fresh off of multiple transgressions, lecture Santorum on anything.
Furthermore, even if Cuomo were simon-pure, his “interview” with Santorum was hideously unprofessional. Taking the accusatory mien of a prosecutor rather than a fair-minded interlocutor, Cuomo tried to browbeat Santorum into submission.
“It seemed like you were trying to erase diversity in the interest of some white Christian Right,” Cuomo said. Later, Cuomo turned it into “a conversation about your party.” (What, pray tell, does the Republican Party have to do with any of this?) “Why are people pi**ed off?” he asked, noticeably emphasizing the profanity. “Because it seems to be the continuation of a trend, not just with you but with the newest manifestation of your party, of beating up the little guy.”
To this, the proper response is that the party had nothing to do with Santorum’s misstatement, which beat up nobody — and which continued no trend from Santorum himself. Santorum built a whole political career on, and wrote a book about, how the Republican Party should help the little guy as opposed to the elites. Elites, by the way, include Cuomo, the son and brother of infamously self-indulgent governors.
“You have done this with homosexuality, comparing it to bestiality,” Cuomo continued. This is a long-standing trope on the left, taking completely out of context (again!) remarks Santorum once made about a Supreme Court case on same-sex marriage. Santorum, referencing a legal argument already made by Justice Byron White in an earlier case and using the same examples later cited by Justice Antonin Scalia, had told the Associated Press interviewer that homosexuality was “not” akin to bestiality and other ills. Yes, that’s right. It was a “comparison,” but not in the sense of “equating” or “likening” two things to each other, but rather to distinguish the two, in the specific context of a Supreme Court justice’s own discussion of applicable legal standards.
Anyway, not content to take out of context an 18-year-old interview, Cuomo then accused Santorum of a history of doing the same thing to “minorities” — implicitly meaning racial minorities — and said, outrageously, that “it seems as if this is part of your party now, that ‘there’s something wrong with these black people, that’s why bad trouble happens.’”
And on and on with the calumny, Cuomo went, even though what Santorum said had nothing to do with blacks and nothing to do with his political party. “This is a continuation,” Cuomo said, “of an ‘us’ and a ‘them,” and the ‘them’ is the Native Americans, the black Americans, the gay Americans. They are all others, they are not us white Christian types.”
Cuomo should be suspended for this demagogic rant, one which he continued even as Santorum, never losing his cool or his politeness, patiently waited him out.
And, for the record, Santorum built a long record in Congress of particular concern for the interests of black Americans. He repeatedly earned endorsements from black pastors in Philadelphia, annually sponsored with black Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma a seminar bringing leaders of historically black colleges to make their case for greater congressional appropriations, and was one of the primary sponsors of the bill creating the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History.
None of which, though, is as important as this: Both Cuomo and his CNN colleague Don Lemon, who engaged in a similar rant against Santorum, seemed to reject the validity of the essential point Santorum made both in his speech and in his later interview with Cuomo. Lemon acted as if he were completely unfamiliar with the difference between, on one hand, a country as a landmass and, on the other hand, a nation, excitedly insisting that “Europeans did not found this country. It was here. The Native Americans had this country before the Europeans came. Yeah, the Europeans conquered this country … but it had nothing to do with the founding of this country.”
Uh, yes they did — exactly as Santorum said, they founded a completely new nation, and that remains true even though we acknowledge that Native Americans were here first on the land. This nation, as a nation, was founded on ideas and ideals, stated in the Mayflower Compact, the constitutions of numerous colonies and states, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. No other nation had ever been founded on a mutual declaration of rights rather than on claims of blood and soil. And, as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said (paraphrasing him), the same nation that asserted those rights convulsed itself to redeem them when it had failed to live up to its own high ideals.
As Santorum said, “we birthed a nation.” There were people here before the settlers came, people with numerous, oft-admirable cultures and traditions – but they were not the American nation, a nation founded specifically on assertions rooted in religious liberty. That history, that reality, is an undeniable fact. For it to seem alien to race-obsessed media leftists — so alien that when they hear the history, they consider it a threat rather than a wondrous promise — is just a sign that those leftists are too oblivious to reality to be serious journalists.
