RE: Rick Santorum’s rise in the polls, winning a few caucuses without delegates and the revision of the Iowa Beauty Contest in his favor:
I will not make the argument that Rick Santorum is a bad man, but I will argue that he is a bad candidate for the Presidency.
All of his “I’m the only goddamned Conservative Beast up here!” chest-thumping aside, one is hard-pressed to find a single, solitary achievement of note in Santorum’s resume. What one does find is a long string of “me-too!” conservative viewpoints, a lot of sounds-conservative-but-is-it-really soundbites, a recitation of all the right talking points, and a long history of ticket-punching.
Santorum would have you believe that he was a solitary voice in the Senate, leading a righteous crusade in that moribund body to see the Conservative view (as it stands today, it leaves much to be desired) against a variety of societal and political forces which, on the whole, saw that particular brand of so-called Conservatism strangled in it’s cradle.
It's the Rape of the Sabines all over again.
What does it matter if Santorum, the staunch fiscal conservative, helped balance the Federal Budget back in the 1990’s; What happened to all that Fiscal Conservatism in the Age of Bush II? What does it matter if Santorum led the fight for the Right to Life movements goals; all they had to show for it during Santorum’s tenure were marginal gains, and ultimately, a misguided, no-brainer Senatorial proclamation passed in the middle of the night, that didn’t keep anyone from removing a brain-dead woman’s feeding tube.
(Note: that in the process of trying “to save” Terry Schiavo, the Santorum-like conservatives trampled all over the supposedly sacrosanct notion of Marital Rights and Obligations, and that such a trampling went both unnoticed and unremarked upon by the greater mass of so-called conservatives at the time, is most telling).
It has become apparent -- to this writer, in any case -- that Santirum’s rise is a natural result of the fall of Gingrich, Cain, Bachmann, Perry and Pawlenty. In other words, as these people have floundered, Santorum has picked up the votes of the died-in-the-wool ideologues and doofuses who have been panicked into believing that they have “No Place Else To Go”. In this case, the No-Place-Else-To-Go voter may, in a backhanded way, be helping to achieve something that a few weeks ago I would have thought impossible:
They may be helping to engineer the race into a contest between the Apparatchik Obama and an Apparatchik Santorum.
Look, this page bears no great love for Mitt Romney -- and already begins to see signs that Romney is petering out -- and is greatly saddened by the now-looking-inevitable self-destruction of Newt Gingrich, but Santorum as your GOP nominee? Have we gone that far down the Road to Perdition that even an underachiever of Santorum’s ilk seems to some superior to the grossly underachieving Obama? A Santorum-Obama contest is sort of like that episode of South Park, in which the school kids are given a choice of voting on a new name for their school teams: Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich?
Santorum talks the talk, but doesn’t walk the walk – except on the Right to Life Issue. That is, in effect, the main case against Barack Obama from the Left over and above the fact that he couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight. The recent brouhaha over forcing the Catholic Church and other religious institutions to pay for birth control benefits for their employees might have been the one stroke of genius the Obama Titanic Team has had in nearly four years: they may have succeeded in ensuring that the guy they probably cannot beat (Romney) is in turn defeated by the one guy they reasonably can (Santorum).
And they would have done it by splitting Conservatives in the process with a bullshit issue, which makes it a doubly-delicious thing. Talk about baiting a hook?
However, I think Obama and his people aren’t really that smart; if recent history is any indication, it would appear that this is perhaps the dumbest White House at least since the Carter Administration, and sothis state of affairs must have begun to evolve completely by accident. The Obama people, by pressing a non-issue (contraceptives are readily available to anyone with $10 and half-a-brain, in your local CVS, and the provision which makes it mandatory being – as they know – unconstitutional and unconscionable), might be unwittingly engineering a more favorable electoral climate for President Knows-and-Does-Nothing. The recent passage of same-sex marriage bills in Washington and (soon) New Jersey are simply more of the same, and have much the same aim; stampede Conservatives away from Romney/Gingrich, and into the arms of the ineffectual Santorum.
I’ve always said that Today’s Conservative is a flying dunce, if only because they tend to see the world through two lenses:
a) Anything that can be tortured into a religious imperative is something that must either be obeyed without question, or reflexively fought against without question. This is the herd mentality in action, and because the Religious Conservative puts his faith before his reason he is always easily manipulated -- by both parties. “The Philistines be upon ye, Sampson!” is their battle cry, and none ever make a conscious effort to ensure that the Philistines are, in all actuality, really upon their doorstep. If they aren't, someone will convince them -- emotionally -- that the attack is imminent, anyway...any day now...maybe after they have lunch.... It’s enough that the cry is raised, for most.
b) Whenever there is an issue of “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”, the Conservative can be counted upon to choose the exact opposite of what Conservative ideology dictates. So long as people got their tax cuts, few, if any, objected to the last Republican congress’ spendthrift ways. So long as Iraq was being bombed and Afghanistan forcibly dragged, kicking-and-screaming, forward into the Mud Age by American Soldiers-cum-Missionaries-with-Stealth-Bombers, no one questioned the policy. When Republicans/Conservatives were expanding Medicare, under the guise of reform, no one batted an eyelash, except for a few who saw in McCain’s Gang-of-14 bullshit the specter of “Rockefeller Republicanism”, which is a euphemism for “Oh, shit, why didn’t anyone see that coming?”
The Conservative, therefore, is blinded by his religion and his pocketbook, and often the order of importance is reversible. Today’s conservative (small ‘c’ intentional) bears no resemblance to the Conservative beast of 1960-1990; he is, at best, someone who at regular intervals punches a specific set of buttons, mouths a plethora of stale slogans, attempts to pass a slew of largely-symbolic, mostly-ineffectual, and contrary-to-doctrine stupidity which passes as “policy”. In this regard, today’s conservative has become what he has always hated the most: a democrat, only one who can quote Scripture as an air-wasting measure, and always to no good end.
Santorum is that kind of “Conservative”, and while Ann Coulter would like you to believe that Mitt Romney is suddenly some sort of Ur-Conservative (after she has spent a decade-plus savaging him on everything from State-run healthcare systems, to taxes, to Family Values issues), he is at least more honest about what he truly is – a pragmatic politician – than Santorum ever was.
Romney at least talks up Capitalism, which makes him infinitely preferable to either Santorum or Obama; wherein the former sees the state of the economy as a decidedly secondary issue, the latter pretends as if the Capitalist system (when it doesn’t benefit him and his friends, that is ) is a cancer. In both cases, we have a man who has put his religion – the Judean-Christian god on the one hand, the Religion of the State on the other – ahead of more practical concerns.
Each is advocating for his own special form of Heaven; Santorum’s Ultimately Useless kind which would succeed in mandating the Ten Commandments be printed on condom wrappers, and Obama’s Utopian Socialist brand. You pick your poison in either case. One would use the power of the state to foster a disguised and ultimately futile Semi-Theocracy, the other to usher in Communism by a different name. Either way, the result is the same: focus upon narrow issues which leave most people disaffected, more stupidity, fewer solutions, and eternal, politicized debate about hills of beans.
Santorum is an empty suit with a list of questionable achievements of nearly 20 years vintage that he can’t stop talking about, assuming, as he does, that anyone actually gives a crap, or is even listening. He is the undeserving recipient of the fruits of an accident of history, vis-a-vis Gingrich. All you need to know about Santorum, both the Brand and his constituency, is contained in one of his more-popular campaign slogans:
Faith, Family, Freedom.
Did you notice which one came first?
That sort of slogan is little more than a marketing campaign aimed at religious conservatives in much the same way that “Yes We Can!” was a marketing campaign aimed at the Welfare Class. The differences between Santorum and Obama are much like the argument over whether people prefer Pepsi or Coke in a blind taste test. In any case, what usually wins is RC Cola. Which is to say, crap.
We have already suffered three-plus years of the Reign of the Marketed President, and I don't think anyone with sense would make the case that another such candidate, only professing a diametrically-opposed ideology, would be considered much of an improvement.
UPDATE: for some reason, George Orwell has been on my mind all morning. I have just recalled an Orwellian quote which seems to fit the present circumstances, and Rick Santorum, to a tee. The greatest peril, Orwell wrote in 1940, is:
An army of unemployed led by millionaires quoting the Sermon on the Mount – that is our danger.
Spooky, ain't it?
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