I have to assume that Rick
Santorum is still in the race to be the GOP nominee because he hopes that some simultaneous outbreak of monkey pox will wipe out the rest of the field. That, or, as a good Catholic, he enjoys a little flagellation every so often - it's good for the soul.
He is probably the thirteenth or fourteenth least-electable candidate in the history of humanity, but we can't seem to get him to just shut the hell up and go away.
Even before the primary, Santorum was
surging in Iowa (eeewww!) at 15%, but he still can't seem to consistently break 5% nationally. Not that he isn't optimistic (or possibly sadistic): he
put it a few weeks ago, "I'm counting on the people of Iowa to catch fire for me." (Which seems unnecessarily cruel, but what do I know?)
The problem is that Santorum is just the latest flavor of not-Romney to hit the shelves. It's his turn to be touted nationally for the next few weeks, until somebody remembers that we're electing a president, not a pope.
Santorum has two major disabilities that are going to prevent his election: his sanctimonious, unpleasant nature, and his aggressively ignorant and regressive social policies. His entire platform, as far as I can tell, seems to be abortion and gay marriage - everything else is secondary. If he
were, by some miracle, to be elected president, we'd have an uninterrupted 4-year fiesta of fag-punching.
We know that Santorum is so homophobic that he'll only eat a corndog with a knife and fork, but is he also racist? Well, that one's a little trickier. He has, for a
long time, been consistently in favor of the full GOP stand on immigration: no amnesty for illegal immigrants, and likewise no benefits for them; deport criminals, strengthen border security, and even the somewhat trickier "English as the official language" stance. And while that has overtones of "scary brown people," it's the Republican party line. So no points there.
On the other hand, it's somewhat telling when you stand in front of a group of white people from Iowa (a redundant statement, but let's move on) and explained that "
I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."
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