What If Santorum Is the Nominee?

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Christ Matthews had a nice gotcha moment on Hardball last night.

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Truly, sometimes Santorum sounds more like a far-right evangelical than a Catholic. See also James Wood, “Senator Santorum’s Planet.” Both Wood and Timothy Egan at the New York Times make the point that Santorum is a theocrat who wants to base public policy on his religious views. Also, too: Becky Garrison, “Rick Santorum’s attacks on Barack Obama are about theology not policy.”

According to an article in Politico, Santorum actually “tests” better against President Obama than the other candidates. This many months from the election I doubt such matchup polls mean much, though.

Sorta kinda related — Charles Pierce notes that something extraordinary happened during the recent debate in Arizona. Santorum actually mentioned President Bush.

He is the man who isn’t there. Until NCLB came up last night, the years 2000-2008 had been successfully written out of the narrative of the 2012 election. For these jamokes, time effectively began in January of 2009. It was Year Zero on the Kenyan Muslim Socialist Calendar. I do not believe that Bush’s political non-personhood is an accident. It is now an article of faith among the Republican base that Bush’s failures stem not from the fact that he was a manifest incompetent, but that he was too liberal a president. Putting through Medicare Part B without paying for it is a greater sin to these people than running two wars off the books was. No Child Left Behind had the endorsement of Teddy Kennedy! (Aieeeeeeee!) If only Bush had tried conservatism, the fairytale goes, then conservatism would have succeeded, as it always does. It never fails. It is only failed. C-Plus Augustus failed conservatism. …

… Since the crimes and bungling of the Bush Administration resulted in a thrashing in the 2006 midterms and, ultimately, in the election of the current president in 2008, this feeling within the Republican base has hardened into an immutable faith. The Republican party has become more extreme, not less. It has become so resistant to compromise that it has become completely resistant even to political logic. (Make no mistake. The party faithful really want this fight over contraception.) I fully expect that, by August at the latest, Willard Romney will be calling the last president of his party a socialist.

I also think the wingnuts can’t help themselves and really will make the election about contraception and other bugaboos rattling around in the wingnut id.

18 thoughts on “What If Santorum Is the Nominee?”

  1. I’m having problems with my laptop, and cleared my cookies – I want to see what my new maha-face will look like? If it was up to Rick Santorum, I’m sure it’d have horns.

    I wonder, if Santorum wins the nomination, if just putting his sour puss next to the one of that evil and nasty-looking SOB, Pope Rat-faced-inger, would be enough to make people realize that this leader of child-humping hide-the-holy-sceptre Priests, Bishops, and Cardinals, will be the one actually running the USA through Rick, will be enough to scare them.

  3. Yeah, I don’t really care how well Santorum tests against Obama right now either. People’s opinions are always only based on what they know. It wasn’t that long ago that Mitt Romney tested a lot better against Obama than he does now, and his slide is attributable entirely to one simple factor: people got to know him better.

    And Rick Santorum is only just starting to get the same kind of attention Romney has been getting for the past several months. The kind of people who read political blogs know all about him, of course, but of course we’re a self-selecting minority.

    A few months ago, I think most voters basically knew two things about Romney: he sort of looks like a president, and he isn’t Barack Obama. Now he’s Richie Rich.

    And right now, I suspect the two main things most voters know about Santorum are that he isn’t Barack Obama and he kind of seems like a nice enough guy. (Even for myself, my impression is that he’s the only one of the four remaining candidates who wouldn’t treat me with open contempt if I met him. I could be wrong about that, though.) They don’t know how he got nicknames like Senator Man-on-Dog and Frothy, or why he was once described as having one of the finest minds of the 14th century. But they will.

  4. Wow. To the right of Pope Benedict. Ricky must be so proud! That’s hard to do.

    I’m glad we’re finally getting some articles discussing both the theological and the theocratic elements of Santorum’s world-view. He is scary in multiple dimensions.

    My one political desire is that he pull the GOP just a bit farther down the path to Looneyville before everyone gets a close look and decides that he’s a crazy person in a nice sweater vest. Just in case there aren’t yet enough people convinced that the Republicans have gone over the cliff of sanity. Obama will still have to overcome the people who still don’t think one of his complexion should be in the office, and the knee-jerk ‘we need a change’ faction.

  5. Stephan,
    We need to make people realize that Rick Santorum is Torquemada, dressed not in vestments, but a sweater-vest.

  6. CUND Glag – I think you are not being fair to Torquemada. As I read Wikepedia, he only exerted his authority as Grand Inquisitor over Catholics or those who claimed to have converted but were practicing heathen religions in secret. He had a method, too. If you were accused and confessed, he burned you at the stake. If you were accused and would not confess, he burned you at the stake.

    Ricky, on the other hand, wants to extend his version of the Inquisition over people who have NEVER converted to his brand of religion. In Ricky’s book, an Rx for birth control or a receipt for a condom constitutes a confession.

  7. Of course! Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! The sweater vest goes perfectly with the Comfy Chair.

  8. Evangelicals and evangelical Catholics have been moving closer and closer. To the point that rightie evangelicals won’t use birth control, either. We cal them parents, and they have lots and lots and lots of kids. They all get homeschooled, and you can spot them a mile away. They have their pants pulled ALL the way up, their shirt tucked in, and a shirt with a collar. The girls are in full length dresses, even in the heat of summer. The Dominionists absolutely believe they should be running the country through the government, indeed, that God has commanded them to do so. And the Republicans are, obviously, their vehicle of choice. That’s why they just won’t compromise, and have brought that to the larger Republican party. They are right and the Dems are wrong/evil/Satan, whatever, and why would you compromise on sin.

    If Santorum’s the nominee, though, it will be a blood bath for the Repugs. I don’t see a way that they could even keep the Senate, and the House may even be in play. But I think it’s important for American politics to have him as the nominee, not so the Dems can win (which is all good), but so that we can get back to two sane parties. I don’t think this can continue too much longer and still keep the Republic together.

  9. cund – you’ve got it. Santorum has a direct line to RATZinger, I’m sure. Pope RAT has never accepted Vatican II. Apparently the RAT prefers the church medieval, a time of serfdom, corrupt popes, indulgences, the Inquisition, and we mustn’t forget burning heretics at the stake (often women) – such a proud time in church history.

    (It’s a wonder that Rick hasn’t called for burning Obama at the stake. Maybe next week.)

  10. Since it’s obvious that Santorum etal are playing to the Tea Party loons, this Sept. 2010 quote from Rolling Stone may inform us as to Santorum etal’s constituency – “Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming horde of suburban soccer moms they’ve mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn’t an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.” The writer prefaced his comment with “They’re full of shit.”

  11. Bringing up the most recent Republican President simply isn’t a winning strategy; it is a desperate move that, hopefully will make that awful party into one big communal tar baby.

  12. This Santorum thing reminds me of 1972 when the Dems ran George McGovern, and lost by a landslide, just as liberalism had peaked a few years earlier. The country wasn’t as divided as it is today, and McGovern, a WW2 veteran, was hardly the nutball Santorum is. But in each case, someone representing the party’s extreme was the standard bearer, and lost big (I’m fastforwarding to November of this year).

  13. This Santorum thing reminds ME of the NcMartin preschool boondoggle back in the 1980’s If you didn’t live in SoCal then, you may not know of it.
    The escapade was a creation of one Wayne Satz, a local reporter, and Kee Mc Farland, a
    psychotherapist /puppeteer with whom he was romantically involved.(go figure)
    Go to Wikipedia for details.
    This is the kinds shit what happens when God tells people what to do.(or at least when others believe that God is directing a “leader”)
    Santorum is a retarded dipshit, and anyone whio buys his line is seriously demented.
    That works out to be about 25% of the population (funny, n’cest pas?)

  14. Ricky’s sweater vests reminds me of the Lawrence Welk show. I don’t know why..but they do.

    Vonderful,vonderful!

  15. Matt Taibbai, Arizona debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost:

    …Throughout this entire process, the spectacle of these clowns thrashing each other and continually seizing and then fumbling frontrunner status has left me with an oddly reassuring feeling, one that I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on….

    …it finally hit me: This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It’s as if all of the American public’s bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.

    Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it’s finally ruining them.

    Oh, sure, your average conservative will insist his belief system is based upon a passion for the free market and limited government, but that’s mostly a cover story. Instead, the vast team-building exercise that has driven the broadcasts of people like Rush and Hannity and the talking heads on Fox for decades now has really been a kind of ongoing Quest for Orthodoxy, in which the team members congregate in front of the TV and the radio and share in the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren’t as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

    The finger-pointing game is a fun one to play, but it’s a little like drugs – you have to keep taking bigger and bigger doses in order to get the same high….

  18. Much as I’d like to think there are millions of responsible adult Republicans out there who can see the world in a realistic manner, going to CNN isn’t what I had in mind. Too many anti -Libruls there.

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