Rick Santorum Explores New Presidential Run

In honor of Rick Santorum’s potential run (yet again) for the White House, I offer my very favorite cut and paste tribute to the spasmodically homophobic zealot.  If this isn’t the best headline, maybe ever….

Rick Santorum. If you know me, or read this blog often, you know I’m not a fan, and I haven’t been since well before he slithered onto the national stage after his vicious and duplicitous campaign against Harris Wofford for a senate seat twenty years ago.  It was an ugly, negative campaign–beyond negative, it was brutal and desperately misleading, and it paid off.  The upright, distinguished Wofford, whose achievements dated back to the Kennedy administration and included the establishment of the Peace Corps, refused to play tit for tat, sticking to his vow to campaign on the issues and refusing to shrink to the level of Santorum’s shrill and angry personal attacks.  When Santorum ultimately won, his campaign staff scheduled a celebration the day after the election–in the lobby of the office building where Wofford’s campaign headquarters was located, forcing the Wofford’s staff to walk through catcalls and taunts in order to go home that afternoon.  It was outrageous, and it’s not anecdotal–I was there in the Federated Tower in downtown Pittsburgh that November afternoon in 1994.  I’ve despised the guy–not only for his politics, but for his angry, hysterical persona.  When he compared homosexuality to bestiality I wasn’t surprised, nor was I surprised when a reporter discovered that after his election Santorum moved his entire family to suburban Virginia, hiding the fact from the school district where he’d lived in Pennsylvania so they would keep paying cyber school tuition for his children.  Yep, this was the same Santorum who worked himself up to a lather denigrating single mothers who received benefits, and who desperately wanted to cut off social security benefits to folks under the age of 70, conning the system.  Nobody familiar with him was surprised.

I was thrilled to learn he’d be running again–he’s unelectable, of course, and his backers support him primarily as a tool through which the debates for the republican primary may be swayed to the right–because he’s a car crash waiting to happen every time he steps in front of a microphone, a stereotype of of thew swarmy, insincere politician conning his core constituency (white, racist, homophobic, teabagger christians) by playing to their fears and hatreds. If you’ve ever seen the brilliant political satire “Bob Roberts,” you’ll recognize a lot of Santorum as a living, breathing example of the disingenuous, cynical, power-mad con-man/politician whose willingness to crawl in the darkest, dankest mud and slime and shit in order to grab a taste of power.

More later.  (I have to go spend the day shopping for prom gowns.  Really.)