Rick Santorum - a subtle attempt to rewrite himself

I picked this up at the Philadelphia Inquirer:

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum seemed to be sending different messages to different audiences on his campaign Web site this week.

English-language visitors to www.ricksantorum.com encountered a home page filled with concern about the "amnesty-ridden proposal" the U.S. Senate adopted to deal with illegal immigration.

But a section of the site for Spanish readers made no mention of amnesty in its discourse on immigration. Nor did it refer to "rewarding criminal behavior" of illegal immigrants, as the English version did.

Gee, I wonder why.

But to be fair (and we are nothing if not fair and balanced here at 2PJ), the Inquirer adds:

But Virginia Davis, the Republican senator's spokeswoman, said Santorum was not deliberately crafting different messages for different people. She said the English version had been updated since passage of the Senate bill May 25 and that the Spanish had not.

"Probably next week we'll have the identical version in Spanish," she said.

Of course, the Senator "was not deliberately crafting different messages for different people." That would be a lie and as we all know, Rick Santorum is always truthful in everything he says. Unless, of course, he's making things up about "Casey Operatives" "stalking" his empty house in Penn Hills.

However, I would be very surprised if the Spanish language version wasn't updated. Now that the difference between the two versions has been discovered, not correcting this would be another huge self-inflicted wound by Senator Man-on-Dog. I just wonder how long the Spanish language version would have remained on-line if the Philly Inquirer hadn't discovered this?

But look at what I found at attytood.com.

Looks like lil Ricky's doing a little post hoc editing with the audio version of his book.

Today, the rival Bob Casey Jr. campaign caught an alteration on one of the book's most controversial passages, the one where the Pennsylvania GOP senator decries the "weird socialization" that he believes that children get in public schools.

That quote is likely one of the many reasons that Santorum is losing by as many as 23 points in the polls to Democrat Casey -- after all, most voters send their kids to public schools and either a) don't think the socialization of learning to interact with a broad and often diverse community is "weird" or b) can't afford to school their kids any other way. In Santorum's case, the whole subject reminds people that his kids were attending an online cyberschool from his now $962,000 McMansion in Leesburg, Va., while working class taxpayers in Penn Hills, Pa. were paying for it.

Soooo...in the audio version, Santorum simply changed the quote -- but not so much. As the Casey campaign is trumpeting today, the auto book now talks of "strange socialization."

Weird = strange. So what's the big deal?

It seems intended to soften the quote slightly -- although it kind of backfires in that it leads instead to new stories like this one, thus calling even more attention to the original "weird socialization" passage.

But then the real big deal is follows:

The Casey campaign, which listened to the audiobook so that you don't have to, also said that a section in which he extolls the virtue of his kids' cyberschool has simply vanished down the memory hole. This isn't a total surprise. Santorum and his people may have underestimated the book's staying power, which is undercutting his efforts to zig-zag toward the political center, as he does every six years.

Uh-oh. The audio version omitted the part about the cyberschool????

Gee, I wonder why.

Rick Santorum - always completely truthful, unless he's campaigning. And he's always campaigning.