Foster Friess, a political activist and Christian conservative who has been supportively linked to former Pennsylvania senator and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum made a tasteless joke of which Santorum has distanced himself.
Friess. who is a huge financial donor to Santorum’s Super PAC, says a person has to be 71 – his age – or older to understand his joke. Santorum, much younger, not only understood the joke but called it a stupid joke.
What Friess said to Andrea Mitchell during an MSNBC interview was:
This contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so, it’s such, inexpensive. You know back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.
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Santorum’s quick reaction to the joke was:
Foster is a well-known jokester. That was a stupid joke. I’m not responsible for every bad joke that someone who I happen to know or who supports me tells. Obviously, I don’t agree with the basic premise. It was a joke. It was a stupid joke. It was bad taste. I don’t know what your preoccupation with it is.
Friess later defended himself when talking with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell by stressing that it was only a joke and saying:
It’s not so much what people say – it’s what people hear, and obviously a lot of people who are younger than 71 didn’t get the context of that joke. Back in my days, they didn’t have the birth control pill, so to suggest that Bayer aspirin could be a birth control pill was considered pretty ridiculous and quite funny. So I think that was the gist of the story. But what’s been nice is it gives an opportunity to really look at what this contraceptive issue is all about.
Friess, originally from Wisconsin, has been a tremendously successful businessman in stocks since 1974. He has been extremely vocal about his displeasure with President Barack Obama in the
White House.
Source: MSNBC
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