Rick Santorum… “Ick! Santorum!!”

I haven’t blogged much about the con­tin­u­ing anti-Mensa fest that has been the Repub­li­can pri­mary moronathon.  It just seemed too easy and I don’t want to be seen as some­one who would pick on a polit­i­cal party rid­ing the short bus off the side of the cliff.  My gen­eral take has been that the repub­li­can power-brokers in their smoke-filled rooms had decided 2012 was a lost cause; so why waste any seri­ous con­tenders.  I mean…Newt, Rick, Mitt, Ron, Babs and the other Rick??  Really?  The only other plan might be that they think these tools will so frus­trate the  lotus-eaters at the rnc con­ven­tion that they could broker-in Jeb (…oh god…you don’t think they’d pull a Palin do ya…?)

Any­who, I’ve already unleashed on the Newt and he’s destroyed him­self, by being him­self, as I prayed to the good Bud­dha that he would.  Bul­let dodged.  I’ve never really wor­ried about Mitt; he’s just a post-modern ver­sion of a pro-business, anti-all of us, gilded age tool of the over­lords.  We’ve had them before, and they can’t really do that much dam­age.  But, Holy Shit Bat­man – San­to­rum scares the beje­sus outta me!  This guy is a real life dem­a­gogue (they’re much more rare than you’d think), a pure reac­tionary, with all the insane self-confidence of a true sociopath.  My hope is that the media wrote him off early and have let him slide, but after his super (as in super scary) Tues­day victories…it’s time for the Palin haters of the lame-stream media to get their social­ist agenda note­books out!

…and they have, good work fel­low travellers!

Rick San­to­rum spent much of last week say­ing that the media should stop pigeon-holing him as a social-issues cul­ture war­rior. Then he spent the week­end say­ing a whole lot of things that made him sound like … a social-issues cul­ture war­rior. The highlights:

1. At a Tea Party event in Colum­bus, San­to­rum said that Pres­i­dent Obama is push­ing an envi­ron­men­tal agenda that is “not about you. It’s not about your qual­ity of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony the­ol­ogy. Oh, not a the­ol­ogy based on the Bible. A dif­fer­ent theology.” Santorum later insisted that this was not meant to ques­tion Obama’s Christianity—“If the pres­i­dent says he’s a Chris­t­ian, he’s a Chris­t­ian.” And indeed, the uproar over the com­ments seems misplaced—it appears that San­to­rum was not wad­ing into Obama-as-Muslim ter­ri­tory but sim­ply traf­fick­ing in stan­dard arch-conservative fare about god­less lib­eral envi­ron­men­tal­ists. (He dou­bled down later by charg­ing that envi­ron­men­tal­ists “ele­vate Earth above man.”) But he did not help him­self by bring­ing in the t-word. Why not leave it at “ideology” instead? Espe­cially given that Santorum’s Savonarola-esque the­o­log­i­cal views were already back in the news with MSNBC’s report of Santorum’s 2008 com­ments about main-line Protes­tantism being “gone from the world of Chris­tian­ity.”  Oops, there goes the south­ern vote!

2. At a Chris­t­ian Alliance lun­cheon in Colum­bus, San­to­rum said that the government’s require­ment that health insur­ance cover pre-natal test­ing amounted to gov­ern­ment pro­mo­tion of abor­tions. “One of the man­dates is they require free pre­na­tal test­ing in every insur­ance pol­icy in Amer­ica. Why? Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free pre­na­tal test­ing ends up in more abor­tions and there­fore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the dis­abled in our soci­ety.” This is obvi­ously a mat­ter close to the heart for San­to­rum, whose 3-year-old daugh­ter Bella was born with Tri­somy 18. But com­ing in the midst of all the Repub­li­can talk against birth con­trol and for manda­tory ultra­sounds for women seek­ing abortions…it’s not exactly likely to min­i­mize the notion of San­to­rum as mod­ern woman’s worst nightmare.

3. At a megachurch in Geor­gia last night, San­to­rum not-so-obliquely com­pared the threat Barack Obama posed to the coun­try to the rise of fas­cism in the 1930s. “Your coun­try needs you. It’s not as clear a chal­lenge. Obvi­ously, World War II was pretty obvi­ous. At some point, they knew. But remem­ber, the Great­est Gen­er­a­tion, for a year and a half, sat on the side­lines while Europe was under dark­ness, where our clos­est ally, Britain, was being bombed and lev­eled, while Japan was spread­ing its can­cer all through­out South­east Asia. Amer­ica sat from 1940, when France fell, to Decem­ber of ’41, and did almost noth­ing. Why? Because we’re a hope­ful peo­ple. We think, ‘Well, you know, he’ll get bet­ter. You know, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This’ll be okay.’ Oh yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy, and after a while, you found out things about this guy over in Europe, and he’s not so good of a guy after all.”

Such remarks con­found the pun­dits, who can­not fathom why San­to­rum would keep veer­ing off a pre-Michigan script that that was sup­posed to be geared toward the econ­omy, man­u­fac­tur­ing in par­tic­u­lar. What this reflects, though, is a mis­con­cep­tion grounded in our lack of expe­ri­ence with true polit­i­cal ide­o­logues. We talk a lot these days about Wash­ing­ton hav­ing been over­taken by con­ser­v­a­tive ide­o­logues, but this is an exaggeration. Many of those glibly par­rot­ing right-wing ide­ol­ogy these days—say, Eric Cantor—are mere oppor­tunists. But Rick San­to­rum is a rare breed—a bona fide ide­o­logue with a fixed and coher­ent world view. He can’t just switch some but­ton and turn off the social stuff and talk jobs instead. It’s all woven together. “I’m not going to go out and lay out an agenda about how we’re going to trans­form people’s hearts,” he said today. “But I will talk about it.”

The con­trast with Mitt Rom­ney, the man who is all but­tons and switches, couldn’t be any greater. In The Real Rom­ney, the new biog­ra­phy by Michael Kran­ish and Scott Hel­man, Romney’s long­time aide Eric Fehrn­strom is quoted say­ing that Rom­ney is “not a very notional leader. He is more inter­ested in data and what the data mean.” The authors cor­rectly take this as a fairly reveal­ing state­ment, an acknowl­edg­ment that Rom­ney lacks much in the way of guid­ing ideas, the­o­ries, phi­los­o­phy. Whereas San­to­rum is all about notions, par­tic­u­larly one very big one: we’re going down­hill fast, in more ways than one, and can be saved only by a theology—the non-phony one.

Bonus Quotes! Cau­tion, very scary stuff… read with a friend!

On the Catholic Church’s abuse scan­dals: “Priests, like all of us, are affected by cul­ture. When the cul­ture is sick, every ele­ment in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scan­dal, it is no sur­prise that Boston, a seat of aca­d­e­mic, polit­i­cal, and cul­tural lib­er­al­ism in Amer­ica, lies at the cen­ter of the storm.”

On same sex mar­riage and bes­tial­ity: “In every soci­ety, the def­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage has not ever to my knowl­edge included homo­sex­u­al­ity. That’s not to pick on homo­sex­u­al­ity. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or what­ever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dra­matic impact on the qual­ity…” Sorry, can’t even bring myself to type the rest of the quote.

On the Mass­a­chu­setts Supreme Court’s deci­sion to approve same sex mar­riage: “This is an issue just like 9/11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on ter­ror­ism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have suc­cumbed to the Mass­a­chu­setts ver­sion of the law?”

…Rick!, ya might wanna google “full faith and credit,” its from that con­tsti­tu­tion thingy

On the link between same sex mar­riage and national secu­rity: “I would argue that the future of Amer­ica hangs in the bal­ance, because the future of the fam­ily hangs in the bal­ance. Isn’t that the ulti­mate home­land secu­rity, stand­ing up and defend­ing marriage?”

On the war in Iraq: “As the hob­bits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mor­dor is being drawn some­where else. It’s being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the eye to come back to the United States.”

On con­tra­cep­tion: “Many of the Chris­t­ian faith have said, well, that’s okay, con­tra­cep­tion is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sex­ual realm that is counter to how things are sup­posed to be.”

On the Afford­able Care Act: “I would tell you that my first pri­or­ity as a pres­i­dent of the United States is to repeal Barack Obama’s health­care plan. I think it’s the most dan­ger­ous piece of leg­is­la­tion, well, in many gen­er­a­tions. It is the rea­son that I’m run­ning for office. Because I believe Oba­macare is a game changer. I believe Oba­macare will rob Amer­ica, the best way I can put it is, rob Amer­ica of its soul.”

On Pres­i­dent Obama’s pro-choice stance: “I find it almost remark­able for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are peo­ple and who are not people.’”

On global warm­ing: “I believe the earth gets warmer, and I also believe the earth gets cooler, and I think his­tory points out that it does that and that the idea that man through the pro­duc­tion of CO2, which is a trace gas in the atmos­phere and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas, is some­how respon­si­ble for cli­mate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you con­sider all of the other fac­tors, El Niño, La Niña, sunspots, you know, mois­ture in the air.”

You as scared as I am now?  I need a hug (while they’re still legal)