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GOP Rick Santorum is a danger to society
Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 08:27 AM
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| Rick Santorum (REUTERS/Joshua Lott) |
Relentless opposition to every item on the Obama administration’s agenda hasn't reaped major electoral dividends for the GOP, but it has exhausted us all.
Put simply, thanks to all the endless stonewalling, the choice that has emerged this cycle is between Yes We Can and No You Can't.
Over the past seven days the GOP have told us that no, we can't raise taxes on the rich, no, we can't have a middle class tax cut, no, we can't have employment extensions, no, we can't have an equal pay act, no, we can't have contraceptive care, no, we can't permit women soldiers, no, we can't marry the person we want to build our lives with, no, we can't have mandatory health care -- no no no.
But what you're actually witnessing is a party whose defunct ideologies no longer have relevance or saleable ideas of their own. No is not a policy.
I come from a society that for decades said no to every political initiative it was offered. Intransigence in the face of unstoppable change, Northern Ireland prolonged its own suffering and retarded political progress by reflexively refusing to give an inch to its political adversaries, with fateful consequences for the nation, north and south.
I see more than a little of that brand of intransigence at work here in the U.S. now. I also hear the religious justification for political opposition that used to stymie any kind of progress before it even started.
I can’t tell you how depressing it is to hear America’s political leaders sound like Unionists in the 1980s.
Just this week Rick Santorum claimed he opposed the president on theological grounds, making explicit what no other conservative presidential candidate has ever dared to. Obama’s agenda is “not about you,” Santorum said.
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“It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.”
Santorum actually believes he has God and the Bible on his side. It’s not just a stump speech that he’s giving.
The Tea Party base have responded to that sincerity and put him 15% ahead of Mitt Romney nationally in the GOP presidential race. Santorum actually believes Obama is attending to someone other than God. I’ll give you three guesses what that means.
Aside from Santorum’s lazy intellectual arrogance, which is monumental, what his speech did was unmask him for the religious fanatic he obviously is.
Santorum believes that women should not work, he believes women should not serve in our armed forces, he believes that gay people can be “cured,” he believes that health care is a luxury not a right.
Santorum also opposes all firms of birth control -- all of it. If you’re a woman he wants you pregnant and back in the kitchen where you actually belong, because to live any other way is just a plot by radical feminists.
“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 find they don't both need to,” Santorum said.
“What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else -- or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon -- find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.”
To Santorum, the reality that 98% of Catholic women in the U.S. have used contraception is a sinister feminist plot. Santorum wants you to live in the same world your great grandmother’s did instead.
It’s important in life to be able to recognize a fanatic when you’re looking at one. Santorum, despite his folksy turns of phrase and his sweater vests, is a religious fanatic.
So how bad can all of this get? During a speech in Georgia on Sunday, Santorum actually compared the 2012 election to America’s all too gradual response to the growing Nazi menace during the late 1930s.
He actually urged his church audience (yes, he was speaking in a church) to not sit quietly while “Europe was under darkness.”
Building on this blatantly stupid Obama as Hitler idea Santorum added, “We thought, well, you know, it’ll get better. Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This will be okay.
“I mean, yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy after a while. After a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe who’s not so good of a guy after all, but ya know what, why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems,” he said.
Santorum doesn’t think he’s fighting an election, he thinks he’s fighting World War II. Beware this man.
See more: US Presidential Race, Rick Santorum, Barack Obama, US politics, GOP
65 Comments
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Seanmor | Mar 02, 2012, 09:13 PM EST
baileyBD: I'm not saying anything for against Santorum, but I strongly support the U.S. Constitution. At least 4 times I have sworn allegiance to that constitution, all for official purposes: 1) Declaradion of Intent to become a U.S. citizen; 2) on joining the Marine Corps; 3)on becoming a U.S. citizen;4) entering NYC Civil Service.
Besides that, I regularly swear allegiance to the U.S. flag at meetings of the American Legion at the local and county levels. I'm not sure what Obama's position is when it cones to the Constitution and the Pledge od Allegiance to the flag, but I always truly mean it when I say "God Belees America" and "one nation under God".
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eiriamach | Feb 28, 2012, 05:18 AM EST
@baileyBD, In a nation that has health care resources, health care is certainly an equal right of all citizens. It is becoming unaffordable by many, and when it is truly a "luxury," only the one percent, who can afford luxuries, will have access to it. If you don't like how I use my access to the US health care system, tough toodles! I don't have a say in whether you can procure Viagra or STD treatments from an MD, and I will not tolerate anyone but a medical doctor deciding-- on the basis of medical knowledge, not sexual politics-- what health care I have access to. Get your "conservative Christian" politics-- which is as anti-Christian as the Taliban-- out of my medical records.
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baileyBD | Feb 27, 2012, 09:39 AM EST
The "defunct ideology" you refer to is the United States Constitution. Health care is indeed a luxury and not a right. There is no consitutional right to have health care or to have the federal government become a nanny state that does all the thinking and supporting of the population. The federal government is supposed to take care of national defense, not tell us how to live our lives or insist that the 50% of the population that does pay taxes should foot the bill for the other 50% that does not. We are a representative republic, not socialist or communist. Rick Santorum realizes that. The blatant stereotyping that the author invokes against a conservative Christian is really what the public is becoming weary of.
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eiriamach | Feb 27, 2012, 07:34 AM EST
On the education discussion: if you do not begin with the colleges of education-- thorough and radical reform if not closing nearly all of them-- you will make little or no progress in school reform. All the reformers-- the school boards, the unions, state legislatures, the education professionals including Washington DC-- have refused to take on the established "academics" of "teacher education." As a result, teachers are simply not educated. Begin there, at the foundation; begin by truly educating teachers in academics, rather than in the "how to" of classroom management, for the first time in several generations. And yes, one of my degrees is in education, so I know whereof I speak.
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TomSwinford | Feb 26, 2012, 12:56 PM EST
AMWilson, I agree completely. I don't know how to fix our public education either but it must be done. Money is not the answer, been there, done that. I think Arne Duncan has some good ideas but his task is monumental. We still have many of the finest colleges and universities in the world - except that increasingly, their student bodies will be foreign born as our own don't make the cut. Yet, Amerasian kids, especially Chinese American, Japanese American and Korean American seem to excel regardless of school or location. As you suggest, so much of success or failure begins in the home. Asian kids are not brighter, they are more highly motivated because at home there are rules and expectations clearly laid down and followed.
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AMWilson | Feb 26, 2012, 12:56 AM EST
Tom, thanks for the clarification. I do agree that among many of the so-called "religious right", "homeschooling" lacks any meaningful education, and is simply a means of passing on ignorance and bigotry while all but ensuring that the children will grow up to be the next generation of a permanent underclass. But unfortunately, it's the inbreds and bigots who grab all the homeschool headlines. Back to public education, what to do? We already pour more $ into public education than any other country, and have very little to show for it. To echo my previous post, I believe that it's "me generation" parenting and a total lack of discipline and respect among parents AND children, along with a popular culture that glamorizes material culture and laziness and lampoons hard work and achievement. I don't have any idea how to fix that, but more $ and more rigorous teacher training isn't going to get us there. The system needs to be completely overhauled to find new ways to motivate parents and students.
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TomSwinford | Feb 25, 2012, 11:40 PM EST
AMWilson, fair point. Certainly some parents are very capable of home-schooling, having the requisite educational competence, time and patience. My point really was that on a broadscale national level - the government at all levels out of K-12 completely, something that Santorum apparently supports - it would be an unmitigated disaster. For example, across large swaths of the South and in rural America, high school dropout rates approach 50%. Many of these people are functionally illiterate. Yet they are often deeply religious, perhaps evangelical or fundamentalist in their convictions and often tend to be anti-government. These are hardly the best candidates to home-school. Our kids must be prepared to compete in global marketplace such as we have never seen. We are already way behind all of the OECD countries in math, science, IT and language skills. Surely our best hope is to fix our public education system rather than return to a system that worked well 200 years ago. My son and daughter-in-law home-school their young daughters but they are exceptional teachers and their 4 and 6 year-old girls are proof of this - but they, too, realize that soon they will need to find a good school for them.
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AMWilson | Feb 25, 2012, 10:58 PM EST
Joanxis, I really can't argue with anything you've said. It is absolutely NOT the teachers' fault; they've been set up to fail, by a system that has allowed self-centered parents to believe that they need not be involved in their children's education, that it's "the teacher's job". I've talked to enough teachers to know that most teachers are skilled, talented, and truly care, but they're hamstrung by the unruly children of parents who act like they have better things to do than parent.
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joanxis | Feb 25, 2012, 10:16 PM EST
Of course homeschooling is successful in many situations. Just look at the teacher/student ratio - 1 parent to 1 to 4 or 5 kids. If education was a priority in this country, which it never has been, the public schools would be a whole lot more successful. With a teacher/pupil ratio of 1 to 24 - up to 34 in some schools, including some kids who have parents who think it's all the teacher's fault and children with differing IQ levels, like the shadow kids whose IQ's are around 70 - a teacher has all she/he can do to be successful at all. I'd like to see some of the people who bash public teachers come into the classroom for just one day and take over the role of the teacher and see how they handle it. Sorry to go off topic. Just couldn't help myself.
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AMWilson | Feb 25, 2012, 09:35 PM EST
Yo Tom, homeschooling isn't 18th century; it's widely practiced today, even among secularists, and it has produced on average way better results than American public schools. There are numerous areas where Santorum can be legitimately slammed, but homeschooling isn't one of them.
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TomSwinford | Feb 25, 2012, 07:46 PM EST
Today in Michigan, Santorum ridiculed President Obama for expressing the hope that all Americans could go to college. "What a snob," said Saint Santorum. Yet Santorum went to college and to law school - and every man and woman in the audience would surely hope that their children and grandchildren would have this opportunity also. But we are being dumbed down daily in this unending GOP clown show. Intelligence has become suspect, almost un-American, ignorance is virtuous, religious lunacy is patriotic and Godly. Santorum has said that the federal and state governments should have no role in the education of our children, that it should be left to localities but preferably to parents - as in home-schooling, as in the 18th century. If it weren't as serious as a heart attack, this guy would be hilarious. his fix for America is more religion and less education, a complete negation of equal rights for women and a belligerent foreign policy that will inevitably lead to another war. Way to go Saint Rick!
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johnozed | Feb 25, 2012, 05:32 PM EST
re: nicoletta: oh those poor put upon catholics. after hundreds of years of pushing people around the slightest bit of criticism gets their robes all in a bunch. give me a friggin' break.
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JohnE67 | Feb 25, 2012, 07:23 AM EST
Santorum needs to realize that the POTUS serves the whole of the country, and must make decisions based on what is good for the country, not the special interests that he is appealing to. Thank Jah this lunatic will never be President.
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AMWilson | Feb 25, 2012, 02:35 AM EST
Yeah, you're right, Micky: that Ron Paul is so "nutty" that he actually thinks that if we stay out of the business of other countries, we can dramatically reduce the likelihood of more terrorist attacks on the US. AND we can save the taxpayer a sh*tload of money in so-called "defense" spending at the very time that the US is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Isn't that just a crazy thought? What a nut!
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