First downer is how successful this guy is. Santorum is winning primaries left and right. Granted he is running against Romney, a clueless rich boob who can't get out of his own way, but still, he is WINNING. Just the other day he called global warming a liberal conspiracy. I read a study that said over 3 million people in the U.S. live in areas that will be "inundated" with water someday soon. They see it happening, but they can't give you an exact date. Would President Santorum blame the liberals as the sea comes crashing through Florida, turning Miami into a modern day Atlantis? We will have to wait and see. In addition to the arrogance reflected here, the guy is also just flat out wrong. There is no federal law requiring a state to declare English as their official language. It occurs to me that I've written about this combination of arrogance and ignorance before. About Donald Trump! Republicans seem to love this combo. It might make a great new word for the dictionary. Ignogance. I'm going to submit it to Webster's today.
The writer makes an excellent point about Santorum doing this deliberately. It's hard to imagine waves of Puerto Ricans coming out to vote for Santorum. But telling the Puerto Ricans to get in line and speak English will play well with Santorum's core supporters who love his ignogant stand on the issues. If I were listening to this I would have asked Santorum to extend his position to its logical conclusion. Why stop at Puerto Rico? Maybe the French would give up their language so France could become a state? That may solve their problems once and for all. And they wouldn't be able to prattle on about "stupid Americans" anymore because they would be....Americans! If we made this option available I bet half the world would take us up on it. Santorum may be able to use English to succeed where aspiring world conquerors from Alexander the Great to Napoleon have failed. We may need another title beyond PRESIDENT to address him. All hail Santorum!
Campaigning in Puerto Rico, Rick Santorum doesn't show any signs that he wants to pander Wednesday, telling voters (erroneously) that they must declare English their only official language to achieve statehood.
You'd think Santorum would want to butter up Puerto Ricans a bit more deftly, given the fact that Mitt Romney's victories in American Samoa and Hawaii last night actually won him more delegates than Santorum grabbed with his Alabama and Mississippi wins. Yet according to Reuters, Santorum told El Vocero, a local newspaper, "Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law ... And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language."
As Reuters helpfully points out, there actually isn't a federal law mandating English as the national language, though some states have chosen to pass one themselves. Putting aside the fact that Santorum made a mistake, he also seems rather unstrategic in a territory in which both English and Spanish are listed as official languages and where people are pretty attached to their Spanish-speaking heritage. Meanwhile, Romney, who's probably very aware the the territory has 20 delegates he can use for his growing lead, had a line we think Puerto Ricans will like a bit more, saying simply that he'd help them if they chose to pursue statehood. Santorum's "English as the national language" issue probably wasn't intended for Puerto Rican newspaper readers though, as it tends to play well among the more culturally conservative voters he's reaching for these days. It may have seemed like a gaffe, but maybe it was a strategic one -- or maybe he's already thinking ahead to the general election.
[the Atlantic Wire]
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