Surely Santorum Can't Be Serious

Tina Marie Nichols, a friend of a friend in Facebook, made an interesting point about GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum yesterday:

Santorum makes good reality TV because he’s that villain whom everybody loves to hate. People will watch him just to see him say shocking things. Somebody’s sponsoring and promoting this clown. Everybody is now talking about not wanting to lose birth control. Whatever happened to the Occupy Wall Street protests? No one’s talking about that anymore. Is Santorum our new little jackass jester who’s dancing around so we'll no longer see the wizard behind the curtain? If I didn't know any better, I'd swear this was all intentional. Someone’s probably sponsoring this fool so the rich can go back to doing what they do without anyone noticing or saying anything.

I’ve noticed other distractions before – the “Whitney Houston deserves less respect than the soldiers fighting for our freedom” and “Muslims are building a mosque at Ground Zero” and “Our founding fathers were all good Christians who wanted marriage to be between a man and a woman” and “Barack Hussein Obama, who wasn’t born here, has launched a war on Christmas” b*llsh*t – but it didn’t occur to me that loony presidential candidates themselves might be giant orchestrated distractions.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Why else would a guy who has about as much a chance of defeating President Obama in November as a cactus receive so much media attention? Why else would a politician who falls more to the right on the conservative scale than Michele “Crazy Eyes” Bachmann, Barry Goldwater, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and Phyllis “Women Are Not Equal to Men” Schlafly combined be polling so well in my state and elsewhere? (An MRG Michigan/Inside Michigan Politics poll conducted last Thursday showed Santorum up 43 to 33 percent on Romney, trailed by Newt Gingrich at 11 percent and Ron Paul at eight percent. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 points.)

Maybe rich right-wing nuts – aided by the corporate media, which are addicted to outrageous sound bites – are propping up and even propelling Santorum forward to keep everyone all tied up in knots and therefore unable to even notice, let alone organize against, the impending war with Iran, skyrocketing gas prices, political corruption (watered-down Stock Act, anyone?) and corporate malfeasance (Lehman, anybody?).

If we’re experiencing seizures because of Sweater Vest Santorum’s latest caveman utterances – assuming we’re paying attention to current events and not “Cake Boss” and “Jersey Shore,” of course – then we can’t really focus on those sleeping in tents (and beating on bongo drums, according to One Percenter P.J. O’Rourke) to protest corporate greed and class warfare.

Santorum actually said these things:

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong.”

• “It’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.”

• “There’s no such thing as global warming.”

• “We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic. Sure, the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”

• “The President of the United States is selling the economic security of the United States down the river right now.”

• “The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. A third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”

• “I don’t think it [birth control] works. I think it’s harmful to women, I think it’s harmful to our society to have a society that says that sex outside of marriage is something that should be encouraged or tolerated, particularly among the young. I think it has, as we’ve seen, very harmful long-term consequences for society. So birth control to me enables that and I don’t think it’s a healthy thing for our country.”

• When pregnancy is caused by rape, “the right approach is to accept...a gift of human life...accept what God is giving to you.”

• “In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might confess that both of them really don’t need to, or at least may not need to work as much as they do…And for some parents, the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home.”

• “I accept the fact that [Obama] is a Christian. But when you have a world view that elevates the Earth above man and says we can’t take those resources because it’s going to harm the Earth, it’s just all an attempt to centralize power and give more power to the government.”

• “There is income inequality in America. There always has been and hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be. Why? Because people rise to different levels of success based on what they contribute to society and to the marketplace and that’s as it should be.”

When I reference “rich right-wing nuts,” I mean people like 71-year-old Foster Friess, a Wyoming philanthropist who’s given more than $2 million to Republicans in the last two decades and is the biggest donor to Santorum’s Super PAC. Friess is the guy who told MSNBC last Thursday, “On this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

Any “gal” who votes for Rick Santorum will surely cause Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Burns, Alice Paul and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to spin in their graves until their tombstones crack.

I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories and complex, diabolical plans, but I’d feel a lot better if this kind of ignorant, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-education tripe – and Santorum’s creepy ultra-religious zealotry – were part of some master plan to Occupy the Electorate and keep us from examining the motives and behaviors of those who really call the shots in this country. He’s just too nutty to be real.

If his candidacy is legitimate – and people who can drive cars and write in cursive actually believe he belongs in the White House in any capacity other than floor waxer or wallpaper stripper – then I apologize to the rest of the world for what the United States has become and mourn the loss of what we used to be.

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Sources: SantorumExposed.com, Detroit Free Press, Huffington Post, DailyFinance.com, AddictingInfo.org.