Andrea Peyser in today's New York Post on Santorum’s weirdness.
If taking a dead child home to cuddle and sing to it doesn't strike you as somewhere between "emotionally overwrought" and "batshit insane" let me know: I want to keep as much distance between you and I as possible.
I’m not, in any way, trying to be insensitive to the Santorum family – they did, after all, lose a child – but this is the sort of behavior one expects from the kind of crazy old woman who freeze-dries her dead-but-beloved cat in order to keep it forever.
There’s something very wrong here with that story; either Santorum just fessed up to some pretty fucked up behavior, or he’s a lying sack of shit. Take your pick. I’d be willing to believe both are true; I base this on the simple premise that people who can’t stop talking about their religion -- and who seem to incorporate it into every facet of their daily lives -- are out-and-out lunatics, who should be shunned and kept from any position of responsibility.
And because Santorum is one of those professional, self-professed “Conservative Values” politicians, that directly translates into 95%-of-what-he-has-to-say-is-hypocritical-self-serving, pat-myself-on-the-back-for-being-better-than-you-with-no-evidence-to-actually-back-that-up bullshit.
A “Conservative Values” candidate in this day-and-age is simply the one guy who hasn’t been caught soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom….yet. There’s been so many of these family values types caught leading double lives that the credibility of all of them has become suspect, in my view.
But I digress, back to the point at hand: Santorum’s mental defect vis-à-vis birth control.
On the list of 10,000 Things Americans Have to Worry About Right Now, birth control, amniocentesis, and abortion rank just below persistent toenail fungus and finally getting an answer to the age-old questions that have vexed us for centuries;
Why do you get 10 hotdogs, but only 8 buns?
How is it that someone shot John Lennon five times, but didn’t even try to aim at Yoko Ono?
Yeah, yeah, I know; there are some who will point out that this entire row about birth control was made an issue by the Obamatards when they attacked religious freedoms by mandating religious institutions pay for birth control. But that is to give the Obama Administration (sorry, oxymoron) credit for courage they all too evidently lack.
For an Administration that actually HAD courage wouldn’t have publicized and temporized over such a measure they knew, or clearly should have known, to be unconstitutional. They would have just done it, and used every weapon in their arsenal to shove it down people;s throats openly and proudly. The point of the entire maneuver wasn’t to get free birth control and make the churches pay for it, and for damned sure it was never about “Women’s Health”; it was to make a political issue out of a non-issue so as to distract from the real troubles in this country. Like how it is that no one has a job anymore.
"REAL" Conservatives, of Santorum's ilk, naturally, took the bait -- hook, line and sinker -- because they ain't the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. After all, they go to church. The reaction was predictable: hue-and-cry over the First Amendment right to freedom of conscience, reflexive cries of Obama The Communist, mass movement of money and votes from one candidate to another. That was the intention in the first place. By their overwrought reaction to a simple propaganda move, the conservatives in this country may have succeeded in re-electing Barack Obama, because Newt Gingrich probably won't be in the picture for much longer -- Santorum got his votes, and more importantly, his money.
The REAL Conservative herd mentality might help ensure that instead of facing a candidate he can't beat (Gingrich), or one that he might have trouble with (Romney), Barack Obama will instead coast to a second term by having to run against Santorum.
If we rate the three Conservative Front-runners as if they were some sort of wall or fence, it goes something like this:
Gingrich: Steel-reinforced concrete wall.
Romney: Chain-link fence, but with stout support posts.
Santorum: Tissue-Paper, and slightly damp tissue paper, at that.
The entire purpose of this bring-up-birth-control-when-the-economy-is-in-the-shitter routine has been to split the conservative vote between the more pragmatic conservatives (who can beat Obama), and the mental defects in the Evangelical camp who don’t wipe their own behinds without three prayers and a hymn, and in the process try to paint all conservatives as unreasonable, crazy busybodies who want to peek into your bedroom windows and gynecologist's office (despite the fact that it is ObamaCare which promises to actually do these things). Rick Santorum is simply the recipient of a bonanza of crazy-stupid good luck in both the circumstances surrounding a non-issue, and the rampant stupidity that infects one wing of his party.
In the long run, Santorum will not win because he is a rotten candidate, and his mental faculties and priorities are questionable. And in losing, the bitterness and disrespect from the GOP that will be felt by the small, but vocal, wing of Religious Bigots within the Big Tent will deepen, and fester, as they do…ohhh…just about every fucking election. FreeRepublic and the other sewers where these assholes congregate will resound with what has, by now, become their mating call:
“If only we had chosen a REAL Conservative, then (Choose one); Obama would have been executed and then deported back to Kenya/there wouldn’t be a Mormon in the White House right now/The Rapture would have happened already/the national debt would have disappeared in four hours/ We could stone gays in the street/the abortionists would have been gassed already/I would have gotten my free flamethrower and complimentary subscription to Tits and Ammo, etc, etc."
And you know what happens? The next time around, they get all “By gum, I ain’t gonna support no one but a true-blue-died-in-the-wool Conservative!” on us, and start throwing their weight, money and votes behind people who can’t win. Like Rick Santorum. And then this starts the entire cycle of “REAL” conservative beard-pulling all over again: we lost last time because we didn’t elect a real conservative; we chose a real conservative this time -- and he lost, so he must not have been conservative enough; so next time, we must elect an even more extreme conservative.
Because that process -- doubling down on failure -- always works, right?
Incidentally, I figure this is the same way by which Muslim suicide bombers rev themselves up for the big boom and the 72 virgins. The problem many religious conservatives have in the political arena stems from their warped world-view; they're so busy preparing themselves for the Next Life, that they've forgotten they still have to live This Life first. The Hereafter becomes more important than The Here-and-Now, and all the people this mindset tags as a fellow-traveler typically winds up being an unelectable nut case… of the sort who takes a dead baby home in order to sing to it.
The more I hear of this Baby Gabriel story, the more I’m reminded of another douchebag -- the cad John Edwards -- who used his dead child in a purely and nakedly political way to get “The Base” out in his favor, too. If Santorum cynically relates this tale to audiences in order to get their God-juices flowing and to burnish his Holier-than-thou street cred in True Edwardian Style, then he should be ashamed of himself.
I should hope this is not the case, and that Santorum telling this story in public is simply a matter of poor taste, rather than a political ploy designed to appeal to the sensibilities of the insensible.
My sympathies to the Santorum family: I cannot imagine losing a child, let alone losing one that didn’t even have a chance to live. Now maybe you can stop talking about it and politicizing it, and get about the business of truly grieving your loss. However, since I believe that Santorum can't help himself, I'd like to say this: just because you've publicized what should have been a private thing, it doesn't give you the moral superiority to start sticking your nose into other people's private lives.
I know that REAL conservatives like to preach in this manner, and believe that if they can relate an experience that's far worse than your own -- only with the trite and contrived happy ending of how God saved them, naturally -- then that gives them the right to tell you how to live.
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