Santorum: "No Coincidence" Between Donation and Introduction of Bill (Sic?)

By DHinMI

A few weeks ago Rick Santorum introduced a stupid bill to prohibit the National Weather Service from providing services to the general public that would compete with services provided by a for-profit enterprise located in State College, PA.  Now it's come out that two days before he introduced the bill, which would benefit AccuWeather, Inc, he received a $2000 contribution from the CEO of AccuWeather. 

So what did Santorum say when asked about the timing of the donation, followed just two days later by the introduction of the bill? 

"I don't think there's any coincidence between the two." 

I'm assuming he meant to say that it was a coincidence, that the two events were close together but not by design.  But it's nice to see Rick Santorum reply to an embarrassing question with an honest answer, even if it was just a coincidence. 

Comments

[Kagro X]

Box. Rocks. Bag. Hammers. & c.

[muledriver]

At least now we know his price.

[mario]

To be fair, he's really, really stupid.

[Frank Krasinski]

Look at it this way; he just gave another juicy issue for exploitation to his opponent in his next election cycle.

[DHinMI]

Mario: Kudos for pulling one of those deft moves where you both giveth and taketh away.

[EliB]

Well... just to be a language pedant because someone has to: "coincidence" is just the noun form of "coincide", meaning two things happening on top of or near each other, like my birthday and Bruce Lee's birthday. Technically it doesn't imply anything one way or the other about meaning or lack of it. It's only in fairly recent usage that it's come to be shorthand for "meaningless coincidence".

But that actually makes Santorum's reply even dumber, since in the technical sense it's undeniably true that the introduction of the bill coincided with the donation.