The Rick Santorum Post

I’m originally from Boston. It says so on the little profile to the right, and I’ve mentioned it a few times. I’m proud of that. I love the Red Sox, I love the culture, and I want to live there when I have a family. A friend of mine from school, also from Boston, just sent me an IM, saying I should write something about Rick Santorum and the comments he made about Boston. I hadn’t heard anything, so I checked Boston.com.

I did not believe what I was reading.

In comments he posted on a Catholic website- no, dammit, I’m not even going to paraphrase this shit. I’ll let him speak for himself. He was talking about innocent kids being sexually molested by priests.

“It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. 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.”

That’s right, you actually just read that.

According to this man, priests in Boston molested, abused and traumatized innocent little boys because they were living in a city of liberals. The people of the state of Pennsylvania elected this man a United States Senator. The same guy, entrusted with the responsibility of confirming Supreme Court justices, who also compared homosexuality to “man on dog” sex.

He wrote this crap in 2002, to be fair, and bloggers only dug it up a few weeks ago. But it is, appropriately, causing a firestorm. The mayor of Boston openly groaned when a Globe columnist asked him about it, and even the Republican governor of Massachusetts (whose coreligionists, about 150 years ago, were calling polygamy a “new and everlasting covenant,”) said Santorum had proven he knew nothing about the culture in New England.

I’ve had an extremely difficult time writing this because I’m so angry, and I don’t do my best work when I want to wring someone’s neck. A friend works in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, and has emphasized to me the importance of defeating Rick Santorum. I knew he was vulnerable to Bob Casey, and that he represents a gathering storm of religious extremism in the Senate. But until today, I didn’t know just how truly insane Santorum- and his constituents- could be.

There is good news and bad news about this situation, and there is a whole pile of bad news compared to a puddle of good. The truly bad news is that Rick Santorum is not the only person who believes this. He did not proclaim this ignorant and evil garbage because he thought it would sound good against the walls of his private office, nor did he think he would be breaking new ground by claiming that liberalism bred pedophilia. No. Rick Santorum, and his conservative constituents from every religious stripe, believe that unwed priests raping little children are in the same moral category as monogamous gay couples who love each other.

If you want more evidence of conservative opinion leaders espousing learned and intelligent opinions on sexual deviance, look no further than radio commentator Michael Savage, host of “The Savage Nation.” Five days after the December 16th, 2004 tsunami, he got on the radio with some words to guide us through a global time of tragedy.

"If you are a God-believing, God-fearing person, I am sure at some point you ask yourself, wait a minute: the epicenter of [the tsunami] was adjacent to the sex-trade island of Phuket, Thailand... We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this, as far as I'm concerned."

You heard about it here. (Thank MediaMatters.org on that one, by the way. This was the same guy who said women’s hormones were “out of control” and they shouldn’t have the right to vote.) The reason the tsunami struck Thailand and Indonesia was because of the sex trade. Oh, I’m not defending the sex trade here. I’m just saying that if you believe the tsunami swamped Phuket because of little boys having sex with American tourists, it’s safe to say that you’d believe priests could be coerced into having sex with little boys because their neighbors voted Kerry.

That is the bad news. A lot of people have the same view of liberals as Rick Santorum, or worse. The good news is that this jackass has managed to polarize a lot of people. Rational religious voters have been forced into doing a double-take at the guy they elected, and his reactionary rhetoric has given the Pennsylvania Democratic establishment an exceptionally good cause to rally around. I’ve always thought that Democrats should be running for something, and not against someone, but Rick Santorum is a great reason to bend that rule.

And it would have been one thing if he’d taken a swipe at liberals in, say, Alabama. There would be about 10 people there who were getting real worked up. But when you go after one of the strongest bases of liberal power, and the school-year home of thousands upon thousands of college students just itching to volunteer for your opponent’s campaign, you have, pardon the term, drawn a bullseye upon your ass. I’d love to see the federal funding report for Bob Casey’s campaign PAC next week. There are going to be a lot of new zeroes there, most with a return address of Boston, MA.

A note to the approximately 1.2 conservatives who read this blog. The biggest complaint of the American right, the motivation behind much of the vitriol coming from Fox News, talk radio and the White House, is that liberals are sanctimonious and convinced of their own intellectual superiority. A common right-wing tactic has been to combat this by claiming a moral superiority, through either religion or patriotism. If you think that you can get away with claiming moral superiority and then attacking liberalism as promoting pedophilia, you are going to learn your lesson at the rapidly-approaching moment when the Congressional aisles turn a refreshing shade of blue.

My recommendation to the Republicans, which I hope (for our sake) they do not follow, is that they cut Rick Santorum off and leave him to the political wolves in November 2006. He’s already trailing 50-39% in early Pennsylvania polls. However, if they don’t, I look forward, along with the rest of blue America, to choking this guy with his own well-chosen words.

I hope we get the privilege of using Rick Santorum as a brick to tie to the Republican Party's submerging feet. And when he’s unemployed next fall, I hope he takes a vacation to Bay State, so we can show him a real Boston welcome.

The Endgame of Plamegate

I’m not jumping to any conclusions, but it’s Karl freaking Rove.

Karl Rove has become synonymous with the most amoral and ruthless political agenda since Joe McCarthy. Part of the reason that we all hate him is because he’s effective; Rove is remarkably good at stirring up “the base,” the hardcore, red-state, evangelical conservatives that put the gas in the neocon tank. Karl Rove’s strategy is appealing to “the base,” and assuming that the rest will take care of itself. So far, it’s worked- until the war in Iraq really started to go south, the Republican Party didn’t have to worry about being a “big tent” party in the first place. “The base” was enough.

(Today’s Arabic lesson: the word for “the base” in Arabic is…anybody? Oh yes, that’s right. It’s “al-Qaeda.”)

Even Rupert Murdoch, the poorly-regulated loudspeaker of the neocon movement, indirectly acknowledged Rove’s universally-poor reception among Americans in the animated show American Dad. The protagonist, a family man/CIA agent, hires Karl Rove to help him win his campaign for church deacon. Great moment: Karl Rove, face concealed beneath a red-and-black cloak, speaking in sepulchral tones, and accompanied by Satanic sound effects, is unable to pass through the doors of a church. Everybody knows the guy is evil.

Real-life Karl Rove story, which some people know and most don’t. The guy broke into Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon’s offices, stole a whole bunch of letterhead, and printed up an ad for a nonexistent campaign rally, which was to provide “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing.” He called it a “political prank” and laughs it off, which I would be okay with, if he didn’t falsely accuse his opponents of doing the same thing about 15 years later. (Just before a major debate, Rove went to the press with a claim that Democrats had bugged his consulting firm’s office. Turns out he did it himself.)

However, he did manage to pull off a number of impressive successes. His trademark is attacking an opponent on their strongest issue. In fact, a few of his business associates consulted for a couple of guys you may have heard of- Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The perception of irony is clearly not present in Rove’s skill set, but winning elections is. He recently decided to attack MoveOn.org by claiming that liberals wanted to offer “therapy” to the 9/11 hijackers, while the conservatives were “prepar[ing] for war.” The group Families of September 11th asked him to please shut his mouth or apologize, and he promptly did neither.

I’m not saying Karl Rove doesn’t have a good reason for being a psychopath. During his parent’s divorce, he found out that his dad actually wasn’t his dad. Then his mom killed herself. I hate him, but I think I can guess why he snapped.

The fact is, Karl Rove has gotten so good at being evil that I assumed the goon who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity would be an underling whose orders from above were carefully obscured. Up until now, I had assumed that the guilty part was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I.L. “Scooter” Libby. Presumably he was acting out of shame and rage that the world was going to either forget him, or remember him as “Scooter.” Also, he sounded a little like G. Gordon Liddy.

But as of Tuesday, July 12, this thing has been blown wide open and there isn’t even much of a media frenzy. The White House is clamming up, understandably, and Scott McClellan is backpedaling faster than a Lance Armstrong tape on rewind from his earlier comment that whoever leaked the information would be fired, and that it categorically was not Karl Rove.

Except there’s an e-mail in which Karl Rove told Matt Cooper that Joe Wilson’s trip to Iraq was authorized by his wife, who worked at the CIA on WMD issues.

(Rove’s lawyer is only contesting that Rove did not reveal Plame’s name, and that he did not identify her as an undercover agent. It’d be like telling a gang of drug dealers that the new recruit “worked for the FBI” but without saying whether he was an undercover agent or not. What the hell else would they be doing, mopping the floors?)

Matt Cooper is not brain-damaged. He would be able to figure out that Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson’s wife about as easily as you or I could. And he would also be able to figure out that since nobody knew Plame worked at the CIA, it was probably some kind of, um, you know, well, secret.

Karl Rove told Matt Cooper that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA on WMD. Nobody is contesting that. Karl Rove is the leak, and as Bush stated nearly two years ago, he needs to be fired. He also needs to go to jail.

Anybody on the left or the right who wants to argue that is welcome to try.