Presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Monday became the second Republican in a little over a month to use the word “vile” to attack a Democratic congresswoman.
Santorum used the V-word to slam California Rep. Maxine Waters, who said at the weekend that the tea party “can go to hell.”
“She’s a caricature of what’s wrong with Congress,” Santorum told New York radio host Steve Malzberg. “She’s vile and she’s always been that way.
“She’s one of these real nasty anti-basic traditional and fundamental values of this country [types], so I’m not surprised that she would say to a group of folks who stand up and defend the constitution of this country, who stand up and defend the declaration and our founding principles, that she finds these people folks that should be condemned.
“This is the left in America,” added the former Pennsylvania senator. “They absolutely despise the founding principles of this country that believe in free people and believe in limited government.
“She is someone who believes that she should control what’s going on in America, that she knows best and that people who stand by constitutional principles of limited government are folks who are to be condemned.”
Santorum said he did not believe that Waters was trying to reduce the impact of her own attack on President Barack Obama last week but said her true feelings were coming out.
“This was a rare moment of candor from Maxine, and if you look back, you will find lots of statements about others of a similar nature.”
Last month, Rep. Allen West used the word “vile” to describe fellow Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He went one step further than Santorum by saying Wasserman Schultz is “not a lady.”
Santorum, who is running way behind the front-runners in the race for the Republican nomination for the White House, also used his appearance on Malzberg’s show on WOR radio to attack Obama for taking on vacation “in a time when the stock market is whirling, the credit markets are roiling, Europe and the banking situation there seems to be heading toward a crisis . . . as we get our credit rating lowered for the first time in the history of this country.”
He added, “The president’s policies have been horrible and harmful, and it’s his lack of recognition of that and his unwillingness to confront his own problems and continue to blame it on everybody but himself which has got America in this negative feeling toward everything going on in the world.”
Santorum said Obama is “completely disconnected from the reality that he has created in this country. We have unemployment rates that are 30 months in a row above the place where the president said we would never go, which is 8 percent if we followed his economic plan.”
He called Obama the “special interests president,” saying, “He breaks everyone up into interests and classes and he tries to cater to one and pits one against the other.
“This was this transformational president who was going to bring everybody together and not be red state/blue state. Everybody was going to work together, it wasn’t going to be special interests, we were going to be the most transparent in history.
“All of this is a great lie and he has been the most partisan, divisive, focused to special interests and his political allies more than any other president in recent memory and all to the detriment of the economy of this country – and that’s what’s really tragic about this.
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