Siddiqui's Sneaky Quotation Truncation

In his latest rant, Harpoon Siddiqui tries (and fails) to conflate Prime Minister Stephen Harper with--wait for it--Rick Santorum's "nuttiness." But that's neither here nor there. No, for me the most salient thing about the rant is that it reveals Harpoon's M.O.--call it the slice and dice method of selective quotation. Here, for example, he cites a Santorum line designed to make the devout Christian sound like an out-and-out racist:

Santorum says he does not want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

But here's what Santorum really said:

Answering a question about foreign influence on the U.S. economy, the former Pennsylvania senator went on to discuss the American entitlement system - which he argued is being used to politically exploit its beneficiaries.

"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program," Santorum said. "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is."

He added: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

Kinda puts a whole 'nother slant on things when you include the rest of the thought, doesn't it? Sort of like how truncating that famous quotation in the Koran--"whosoever killeth a human being... it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind"--completely changes its meaning.