I don't like Rick Santorum at all. I don't think most people do. He looks nervous whether he's at a debate or in an interview, like he thinks everyone just googled his name or something. But, this side of Ron Paul, he's certainly the most sincere of the GOP candidates. He's his own worst enemy and the reason he won't get the nomination.
A Santorum presidency would be like an American Catholic Taliban. Having a wife and kids, he can't ever run for Pope. Instead, he must settle his sights on the presidency and try to run America as if he were Pope. No one in the republican party really wants that. I don't think they're really all that into Catholics. When JFK was running for president, there was a fear that he would be taking orders from The Vatican. I'm sure people in the party might not-so quietly wonder whether Romney might take orders from Utah as they are not comfortable with his Mormonism, whoever is running that relatively new religious show. I have heard that he's planning to take away our coffee his first day in office....
But, Santorum wants to do more than that coffee thing I just made up and that is why he won't get the GOP nomination. I think the higher-ups in the party might be thinking he takes this stuff too seriously and might be a bit worried about that. Romney is the presumed candidate because he looks like a candidate and acts like a candidate. Don't listen so much to what he says but how he says it. Politicians rarely answer questions directly. There's always factors, the primary factor being, "What does this group of people want to hear?" They have to tailor their *beliefs* to the audience of the moment. If he had stayed in the race longer, Herman Cain might have found himself addressing a Klan rally and promising to ship himself and all his people back to Africa....if he got their votes. That's politics.
Sincerity aside, Santorum is not a viable candidate even in these days when republicans tell us we are really looking for family values and guidance in the form of small government. We're not. They make a lot of noise about the small government thing but, that's to keep us from realizing how big they actually want government to be. Does liberty get anymore individual than a woman's body? A man's too? How about our minds? That is the usual progression of things.
The common misremembrance of a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson but actually made by Gerald Ford is, "A government big enough to give you everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything you have."
So too is a government big enough to be small enough to slither inside a woman's body just to keep an eye on things. We do not need such talibangelical thinking in our White House.
First they came for my uterus but, I was not a woman so I did nothing....
2 comments:
We've just started watching a series called God in America. This week it was all about the Puritans and how one woman (I forget her name - Hodgkinson, Hutchinson?) was cast out because she was preaching that you didn't need a go-between to reach God. The church is all about placing the power in mens' hands and keeping women barefoot and pregnant.
Of course, the show was about more than that, but that's what stuck with me :)
Several churches are huge, powerful money-makers. Potential huge voting blocks. However, with 98% of Catholics using contraception, Santorum is stuck with the 2% that are probably nuns anyway.
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