Post by Moses on Jul 26, 2005 18:24:01 GMT -5
Senator in a hole, should stop digging
By Francis Volpe, July 26, 2005
I will stipulate right from the start that Pennsylvania's junior senator, Rick Santorum, has a constituency.
In two campaigns for the House and two more for the Senate, he's never lost an election. He's now risen to the no. 3 leadership position among Senate Republicans, and if he maintains his winning streak in the 2006 election, he might very well rise to the leadership, since the current leader, Sen. Bill Frist, is not seeking re-election.
Indeed, he's doing nothing to quiet rumors that he has a presidential campaign penciled into his five-year day planner. Given his unquestioned ability to win elections, most people I know are taking this possibility seriously.
And yet, ever since sometime last year, he's turned into a veritable piñata of gaffes, embarrassments and howlers. I say that from my own point of view, obviously, but I find it hard to believe that anyone looking at the senator's story arc with an objective eye isn't seeing the same thing.
The green flag dropped on Santorum's race to the bottom early in 2004 during an interview for an Associated Press profile. Apparently fearful that the reporter sitting across from him might not render his opposition to gay marriage in strong enough terms, he started comparing it to polygamy, pederasty and bestiality.
The reporter's next "question" was, "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog' with a United States senator; it's sort of freaking me out."
Then there was that controversy over Santorum making the Penn Hills School District pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition so his Virginia-resident kids could attend an online charter school. A court recently ruled he doesn't have to pay Penn Hills back.
Recently a 3-year-old article Santorum wrote for a Catholic publication about the priest sex-abuse scandal came back to haunt him. The senator's explanation for the situation: The scandal started in Boston, liberals live in Boston, therefore liberals made priests molest children.
Considering that the Catholic church has been harassing liberal priests, nuns and theology professors for the last couple of decades while exalting such bastions of conservative Catholic thought as Opus Dei, Santorum has no business blaming any of his church's ills on anything resembling liberalism.
Now he's seeking out big game with his new book "It Takes a Family," and if you think his choice of title is a shot at fellow senator Hillary Clinton, go to the head of the class. The Washington Post reported a recent exchange between the two in the halls of the Capitol:
"Hey Rick, it takes a village," Clinton jibed.
"It takes a family," Santorum shot back.
"A family is part of a village, Rick."
Santorum's book idealizes the "Ozzie and Harriet" family at the expense of everyone else's living arrangements. Hardly anybody opposes the two-parent-family model, no matter what conservatives like Santorum would have you think.
But there's an old saying: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. A lot of Harriets-in-training lost their Ozzies in job accidents, military service, or because their particular Ozzie ran off with Donna Reed, leaving Harriet to bring up David and Ricky alone.
Santorum, for all his "takes a family" posturing, is, in his book, a lot more worried about Harriet receiving a welfare check. And though he doesn't say it straight out, he strongly implies that accepting government assistance is directly related to moral turpitude.
Whatever happened to "judge not lest you be judged?" Plenty of good church-going people receive direct government aid, as Penn Hills School District will be happy to affirm.
Santorum has picked a peculiar career path for someone concerned with strengthening our moral fabric. Inside the Beltway, the Ten Commandments play second fiddle to the Seven Deadly Sins on a regular basis.
Ever hear of the "K Street Project?" It's a GOP initiative to strong-arm lobbying firms into firing Democrats and hiring Republicans. Santorum is a big player in this initiative, which reflects no New Testament value I'm familiar with.
You will recall the junior senator voted with the minority to impeach a Democratic president over a sexual peccadillo. Presented with the sorry saga of U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood, R-Wilkes-Barre — he kept a mistress for five years and is accused in a civil suit of assaulting her — Santorum said, "… we should look at the job that Congressman Sherwood is doing and make decisions based on the facts and the work that he's doing."
Like they say on the liberal blogs, IOKIYAR — It's OK If You're A Republican.
And Santorum doesn't do real well as a senator with "culture of life" issues outside of abortion. He's on board with capital punishment and the invasion of Iraq — both of which were condemned by Pope John Paul II, his spiritual leader.
For most people, religion and morals are a means to live a good life and try to make sense of life's big questions. For Santorum, they're a truncheon to pound political opponents with.
Unfortunately, there's a big constituency for that, too.