ThinkProgress, joining the fleet of liberal bloggers dredging up Rick Santorum’s rhetoric to use against him, has compiled a list of Rick Santorum’s “most outrageous campaign statements.” Unfortunately, many of Santorum’s statements are factual and not outrageous at all — unlike some of the headlines in ThinkProgress’s list.

“I’m for income inequality. I think some people should make more than other people.”

Unless TP has lurched farther to the left than we knew, this seems like an entirely reasonable statement — does anyone in a capitalist, or even socialist, society dispute that, say, a university professor should make more than an elementary-school teacher? Santorum made his point reasonably: “I’m not for income equality. I’m not for equality of result — I’m for equality of opportunity.” Americans may differ on what equality of opportunity means, but the sentiment seems unobjectionable.

If ThinkProgress had placed the quotation in context, they would have revealed more remarkably fair sentiments: Santorum was actually offering some kind of support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, saying, “The reason you see some sympathy among the American public for them is the grave concern — and it’s a legitimate one — that blue-collar workers, lower-income workers, are having a harder and harder time rising.” He then proceeded to his discussion of equality of opportunity.

“Contraception is a license to do things.”

This is a fair and accurate statement, not an “outrageous” one. Contraception is, of course, a license — in the sense of freedom granted — to sex without (some of the) consequences. Santorum has repeatedly emphasized that he does believe states should have the right to ban contraception, but though “they have the right to do it, they shouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t vote for it if they did.”

Read more at  The Corner – National Review Online.