Santorum remembers Mandela by comparing Obamacare to apartheid

You had to know this was coming.

Some on the right wing have immediately tried to downplay the death of civil rights icon Nelson Mandela.

Mediaite reports that Bill O’Reilly on his show last night did not mention the fresh news that Mandela had passed away until 23 minutes into the broadcast, with a ham-handed attempt at a segue from Hillary Clinton to the former South African president.

In the middle of an interview with failed 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santorum, according to Mediaite, the discussion went like this:

“He was a communist, this man. He was a communist, all right?” O’Reilly said, repeating a charge leveled against Mandela by the apartheid government; a charge, as noted earlier, he denied.

“But he was a great man,” O’Reilly continued, later adding, “But he was a communist, but I would never attack Nelson Mandela,” finally asking Santorum: “Why can’t you guys in the Republican Party bring that to the fore?”

Santorum replied that “Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice, and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that’s the reason he mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed. You are right, what he was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer, but he was fighting against some great injustice. And I would make the argument that, you know, we have a great injustice going on right now in this country, with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives. And Obamacare is front and center in that.”

Over at Think Progress, they pointed out that Santorum’s comparison was not only foolish, it was a poor choice of foolishness. After bringing an end to apartheid rule, Mandela enshrined in the new South African constitution a fundamental right to health care for all citizens, and introduced a government-funded public health care system to help cover those who could not afford the private system already in place.

Mediaite columnist Tommy Christopher  draws this conclusion:

“Aside from the predictably absurd substance of Santorum’s comparison, though, the hours after the death of the first black South African president just doesn’t seem like the time to appropriate any part of his legacy to slag anyone, particularly the first black president of the United States.”