He still doesn't enjoy hearing the word "froth," but nobody's happier this week than Rick Santorum, except for dedicated Santorum-baiters like me. Now that he's back in the GOP race with a vengeance, he can barely go ten minutes without noticing the taste of shoe leather in his mouth. The meeting of CPAC over the last couple days has given the newly ascendant Rick a chance to be all the Rick he can be, and Santorum has risen to the occasion.
What's CPAC, you may ask? Isn't that what I took last time I had an ear infection? No, it's a revival tent meeting of the right wing, a convention of people who think the only thing wrong with America is everything the government has done since 1912. I had to Google it myself to get up to political speed on it. It stands for the Conservative Political Action Conference, and all the Repub candidates are being vetted by it. As far as I can tell, it's entirely comprised of people who think Obama is a Trotskyite and Ann Coulter is an attractive woman.
Santorum took it by storm. He denounced some health care regulation that required Catholic hospitals to offer contraception coverage to their employees as a horrifying attack on civil liberties, saying "It's about economic liberty; it's about freedom of speech; it's about freedom of religion. It's about government control of your lives and it's got to stop."
Okay, call me socialist scum, but I don't think that making health insurance cover birth control means we're cutting the ribbon on the American Gulag. In fact, it seems that no individual citizen is going to be forced to do or not do anything as a result of the regulation. Nonetheless, Rick sees an implacable onslaught against individual freedom. What he doesn't think are individual freedom issues are forcing women to have children by their rapists, or allowing states to keep people from buying contraceptives altogether, or regulating what sex acts people can perform in their homes.
Got it? It's naked tyranny when the government forces regulation on hospitals and insurance companies, but when the state tells us how we can have sex and who with, we are breathing the bracing air of pure freedom.
Rick also got down on global warming, denouncing it as a hoax, perpetuated by those sly pranksters at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The CPACers agreed. What do a lot of PhD's whose fellow thinkers invented all the conveniences of the modern world know?
The newly controversial practice of fracking was also endorsed by Santorum. "What's going to happen if you shoot a bunch of chemicals into the ground?" the Senator asks, and then answers his own question, "Nothing."
I don't know enough about fracking to know whether it's a good idea or not, and I never will, but I'm willing to listen to the arguments. Not Rick. Whatever frackers say about the practice is good enough for him.
The spirit of Santorum has resonated throughout history. Believing exactly what you want to believe has always worked perfectly for the world's decision makers. Here are a few historical dates and what Rick would have said on them:
April 14th, 1912. Titanic sinks.
Santorum: Some boat, huh? I wouldn't be afraid to hit an iceberg in this thing.
June 4, 1939. SS St. Louis, with 939 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany on board, kept from landing in the United States.
Santorum: What's going to happen if we don't let these Jews in? Are the Germans going to kill all of them? I doubt it.
July 16, 1945. First atomic bomb tested in Alamogordo, NM.
Santorum: "We're wasting our time. What's going to happen if we wap a few atoms together? Nothing.
December 6, 1941
Santorum: Let's put all of our ships in Pearl Harbor. The Japs don't have enough balls to attack us there.
1961
Santorum: Thalidomide? Greatest thing since sliced bread. I was so tired of the wife waking me up every morning with her retching.
Anytime prior to 1989
Santorum: There's no better or safer insulation than asbestos.
Anytime prior to 1996
Santorum: Unleaded gas? I don't see how that's going to work. Next thing you know, they'll want to take it out of paint, too.
If you want to follow CPAC and hear more intense reasoning like that demonstrated above, today's your last day. Sarah Palin's going to flash her gams as keynote speaker. I'm sure it's on some cable channel or another. Me, I'm going to field test some pale ales instead.
What's CPAC, you may ask? Isn't that what I took last time I had an ear infection? No, it's a revival tent meeting of the right wing, a convention of people who think the only thing wrong with America is everything the government has done since 1912. I had to Google it myself to get up to political speed on it. It stands for the Conservative Political Action Conference, and all the Repub candidates are being vetted by it. As far as I can tell, it's entirely comprised of people who think Obama is a Trotskyite and Ann Coulter is an attractive woman.
Santorum took it by storm. He denounced some health care regulation that required Catholic hospitals to offer contraception coverage to their employees as a horrifying attack on civil liberties, saying "It's about economic liberty; it's about freedom of speech; it's about freedom of religion. It's about government control of your lives and it's got to stop."
Okay, call me socialist scum, but I don't think that making health insurance cover birth control means we're cutting the ribbon on the American Gulag. In fact, it seems that no individual citizen is going to be forced to do or not do anything as a result of the regulation. Nonetheless, Rick sees an implacable onslaught against individual freedom. What he doesn't think are individual freedom issues are forcing women to have children by their rapists, or allowing states to keep people from buying contraceptives altogether, or regulating what sex acts people can perform in their homes.
Got it? It's naked tyranny when the government forces regulation on hospitals and insurance companies, but when the state tells us how we can have sex and who with, we are breathing the bracing air of pure freedom.
Rick also got down on global warming, denouncing it as a hoax, perpetuated by those sly pranksters at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The CPACers agreed. What do a lot of PhD's whose fellow thinkers invented all the conveniences of the modern world know?
The newly controversial practice of fracking was also endorsed by Santorum. "What's going to happen if you shoot a bunch of chemicals into the ground?" the Senator asks, and then answers his own question, "Nothing."
I don't know enough about fracking to know whether it's a good idea or not, and I never will, but I'm willing to listen to the arguments. Not Rick. Whatever frackers say about the practice is good enough for him.
The spirit of Santorum has resonated throughout history. Believing exactly what you want to believe has always worked perfectly for the world's decision makers. Here are a few historical dates and what Rick would have said on them:
April 14th, 1912. Titanic sinks.
Santorum: Some boat, huh? I wouldn't be afraid to hit an iceberg in this thing.
June 4, 1939. SS St. Louis, with 939 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany on board, kept from landing in the United States.
Santorum: What's going to happen if we don't let these Jews in? Are the Germans going to kill all of them? I doubt it.
July 16, 1945. First atomic bomb tested in Alamogordo, NM.
Santorum: "We're wasting our time. What's going to happen if we wap a few atoms together? Nothing.
December 6, 1941
Santorum: Let's put all of our ships in Pearl Harbor. The Japs don't have enough balls to attack us there.
1961
Santorum: Thalidomide? Greatest thing since sliced bread. I was so tired of the wife waking me up every morning with her retching.
Anytime prior to 1989
Santorum: There's no better or safer insulation than asbestos.
Anytime prior to 1996
Santorum: Unleaded gas? I don't see how that's going to work. Next thing you know, they'll want to take it out of paint, too.
If you want to follow CPAC and hear more intense reasoning like that demonstrated above, today's your last day. Sarah Palin's going to flash her gams as keynote speaker. I'm sure it's on some cable channel or another. Me, I'm going to field test some pale ales instead.
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