Rick Santorum equates Mandela’s fight against apartheid with fight against Obamacare

Nobody has ever accused Rick Santorum of sober second thought, and he reminded us why late Thursday just hours after Nelson Mandela’s death.

Speaking to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, Santorum compared the fight against apartheid in South Africa to the Republican Party’s opposition to Obamacare.

“What he was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer, but he was fighting against some great injustice,” Santorum told The O’Reilly Factor.

“And I would make the argument that 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 of that.”

O’Reilly was probing Santorum about the Republican Party just hours after Mandela’s death. He wanted to know why the Republicans seemed so fractured, and would they borrow from Mandela’s playbook to win the 2016 presidential election.

“So why can’t you guys in the Republican Party bring that to the fore?” O’Reilly said, suggesting otherwise would welcome "President Hillary Clinton."

The Fox News host, however, has no lost love for Mandela. While he respected Mandela, he didn’t agree with his methods.

“He was a great man,” O’Reilly said. “But he was a communist. But I would never attack Nelson Mandela.”

Santorum, 55, lost the Republican presidential nomination to Mitt Romney last year. He's a former senator from Pennsylvania.

Mandela died Thursday at age 95 after dedicating his life to achieving equality for blacks in a South Africa dominated by whites.

He spent 27 years inside a Robben Island jail cell after he was arrested and charged with treason in the early 1960s. Upon his release in 1990, Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

Mandela and former South African president FW de Klerk shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.

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