The Most Terrible Things Rick Santorum Has Ever Said
On the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals: “Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”
On same sex marriage and bestiality: “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality…”
On the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision to approve same sex marriage: “This is an issue just like 9/11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?”
On the link between same sex marriage and national security: “I would argue that the future of America hangs in the balance, because the future of the family hangs in the balance. Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?”
On the war in Iraq: “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the eye to come back to the United States.”
On contraception: “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
On the Affordable Care Act: “I would tell you that my first priority as a president of the United States is to repeal Barack Obama’s healthcare plan. I think it’s the most dangerous piece of legislation, well, in many generations. It is the reason that I’m running for office. Because I believe Obamacare is a game changer. I believe Obamacare will rob America, the best way I can put it is, rob America of its soul.”
On President Obama’s pro-choice stance: “I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.’”
On global warming: “I believe the earth gets warmer, and I also believe the earth gets cooler, and I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man through the production of CO2, which is a trace gas in the atmosphere and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas, is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all of the other factors, El Niño, La Niña, sunspots, you know, moisture in the air.”
By: TNR Staff, The New Republic, January 5, 2012
Mitt Romney And The Privileges Of The Very Wealthy: “Thanks, Much Obliged”
What better person than the French-speaking Mitt Romney to lay bare the pure beating heart of noblesse oblige.
Sunday morning’s NBC debate in Concord, N.H. was a vast improvement over the ABC one the night before — it occurred to the non-Romney candidates that they might want to train their fire on the man who’s up 20 points in the New Hampshire polls. Their focus trailed off as the debate progressed, but Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich did manage to produce a revealing exchange at the outset regarding Romney’s motivations to enter politics. They challenged Romney’s oft-repeated claim that he, unlike they, was no career politician but rather a man who saw running for office as the duty of a good citizen who, when his work is complete, returns like Cincinnatus to his plow, or to his carried-interest loophole for private equity investment managers, as the case may be. In the best zinger of the debate, Gingrich chalked this up as a bunch of “pious baloney.” But it is these lines of Romney that should get the attention. From Ben Smith’s writeup:
Mitt Romney suggested in today’s debate that only rich people should run for office, and then quickly celebrated the fact that he’d forced a rival to take out a loan against his house. Romney said his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, had told him, “Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage.”
“If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference,” he recalled his father telling him. “Also, don’t get in politics if your kids are still young because it might turn their heads.”
A few seconds later, he bragged about his run against Teddy Kennedy. “I was happy he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” he said.
The exchange with Newt Gingrich brought out Romney at his most tone-deaf, and echoed his offer of a $10,000 bet to Rick Perry in an earlier debate. Romney’s rivals are already looking for ways to turn his wealth — and his tone-deaf treatment of it — into a liability. The Obama campaign regularly blasts him as out-of-touch with the lives of American workers.
So: the person running on the vision of a “merit” and “opportunity” society opposed to Barack Obama’s “entitlement” society believes that politicians should be independently wealthy, not peons who have to rely on the paltry earnings of a U.S. senator or governor. It’s worth noting that this is hardly the first time that Romney has depicted his move into politics in 1994 in this light. In his 2007 piece about Romney’s relationship with his father, who after running American Motors became governor of Michigan and ran for president in 1968, Jonathan Cohn wrote: “George Romney had always said the ideal time to run for public office was after you had achieved financial independence and your children were old enough to put up with the loss of privacy.” So Mitt today was just echoing the advice of the father he revered. But of all the aspects of George Romney that are to be admired — including many lacking in his son — this brand of noblesse oblige wasn’t one of them. Once again, I’m simply amazed that the Republican Party, at a time of heightened consciousness about the privileges of the very wealthy, is on the verge of nominating a quarter-billionaire who, when presented with the notion of running for president, says: thanks, much obliged.
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, January 8, 2012
The Grating Santorum: A Student’s Worst Nightmare
Rick Santorum was locking down the youth vote.
The man who fondly recalls nuns rapping his knuckles with rulers did some verbal knuckle-rapping of his own on Thursday with students at a forum in Concord hosted by New England College.
Not satisfied with mentioning homosexuality in the same breath as bestiality and pedophilia, as he did in 2003, Santorum tried to win over the kids by equating homosexuality with polygamy.
Even for Santorum, it was a masterpiece of antediluvian abrasiveness — slapping gays and Mormons at the same time.
When 17-year-old Rhiannon Pyle, visiting with her civics class from Newburyport, Mass., pressed Santorum on how he could believe that all men are created equal and still object to two men in love marrying, he began nonsensically frothing.
“So if everybody has the right to be happy, so if you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that O.K.?” he said, adding, “Well, what about three men?”
The grating Santorum was their worst nightmare of a bad teacher. He merely got booed; he’s lucky the kids didn’t TP his car or soap the windows.
In a campaign where W. is an unmentionable, Santorum is an unexpected revival of Bushian uncompassionate conservatism.
He got more scattered boos on Friday at a library in Keene and a private high school in Dublin. In Keene, he was asked if he would protect gay rights, since gays are “children of God” too.
“Serving in the military is not an unalienable right, it’s a privilege, you’re selected,” replied the candidate, who wants to restore “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He also called marriage “a privilege, not a right,” for the purpose is procreation.
Rick Perry baits gays because it’s good politics; Santorum sincerely means it. His political philosophy is infused with his über-Catholicism but lacks humanity.
At the Dublin event, 16-year-old Jessica Scharf asked Santorum how her handicapped brother could be cared for without help from the federal government. He replied, as The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye reported, that he and his wife “bear the cost” of a handicapped daughter; he said family, friends, neighbors and the church could help, and that caring for someone would knit them closer. Scharf told Seelye later that such a group was not equipped to handle her brother, who has multiple handicaps.
New Hampshire’s feisty voters don’t seem as enraptured with Santorum’s rigid conservatism and sweater vests as evangelical voters in Iowa were. Many are pushing back on the wacky worldview of Senator Slash, as Santorum was once known for his vicious attacks on Bill Clinton and other Democrats.
He bashes President Obama as a European-style socialist and preaches fiscal conservatism. Yet in the Senate, he made sure dollars from the socialistic Medicare program went to Puerto Rico on behalf of a hometown firm — United Health Services — that later gave him nearly $400,000 in director’s fees and stock options.
He was among the pay-for-play Republicans who tried to strong-arm lobbyists and say that if you wanted to have influence you had to cough up campaign money.
While Karen Santorum was home-schooling their seven children in Virginia, Santorum soaked the Pennsylvania taxpayers to the tune of $100,000 by enrolling the children in a Pennsylvania cyber charter school.
The preface to Mrs. Santorum’s 2003 book of moral parables teaching children good manners was written by Joe Paterno, who warns against “a decline of civility and a coarsening of society.” And he knows how that goes.
In his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” Santorum goes off on “radical feminists” poisoning society: “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?”
In Iowa, he tossed out a line about food stamps that NPR reported this way: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” He later told CNN that he was “pretty confident” that he didn’t say “black.” The only alternative, watching the video clip, is that he said “blah.” He doesn’t want to make blah people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money?
Santorum’s hot politics of aggrievement have competed with Mitt Romney’s cold politics of convenience. But soon Santorum will be gone and Mittens will reign as the calculating consultant type, unpersuasive in premium denim mom jeans, his hair slicked and gray, a lead in a ’50s B movie.
Santorum thinks he’s a bold color and Romney’s a pastel. But the whole Republican field seems ensconced in a black-and-white ’50s diorama. It’s like they’re running for president of Leave It to Beaverland.
As Tony Soprano told Meadow, “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house, it’s 1954.”
By: Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 7, 2012
Why Romney’s Relationship With GOP Voters Is Like An Arranged Marriage
Other than the losing candidates themselves, the people unhappiest with the Iowa results must be journalists and Democrats.
Journalists for the simple and obvious reason that a fierce battle is a lot more interesting to watch, and to write about, than a triumphal march. And Democrats because, even though Mitt Romney didn’t emerge from the caucuses entirely unscathed, what he suffered was, as they used to say in old cowboy movies, “just a flesh wound.” And since Democrats know Romney is the most dangerous — arguably the only dangerous — Republican presidential candidate in the field, they would like to have seen him injured far more grievously than actually occurred. An eight-vote win isn’t much of a win (his margin of victory was even narrower than Al Gore’s in the 2000 presidential election), but no one can call it a defeat.
Perhaps the best way to think about Republican primary voters this year is to imagine them as the bride in an arranged marriage. Her parents have chosen well for her, better than she had any right to expect; she has no grounds for complaint and knows it. The groom they have found for her is responsible, decent, reliable, a good provider, and even very handsome. But he just doesn’t excite her. There’s nothing about him that makes her heart beat faster. When she contemplates a future being wedded to him, something inside her shrivels up and dies.
So in the months before the marriage she goes a little crazy. Spends her nights at the bars in a bad section of town. Lets inappropriate strangers buy her drinks, and goes home with more than a few of them. Deep in her heart, she knows her behavior isn’t merely ill advised, it’s foolhardy. These guys (and even one woman!) won’t make her happy even for a night, let alone a lifetime. They’re all wrong, and some of them are even a little nuts. But they’re dashing and dangerous and transgressive, and she’s in that heedless mood where she just doesn’t give a damn. By morning, she always realizes she’s made a dreadful mistake. But that’s desperation for you: She doesn’t want to be reasonable, she wants to rebel. And this is looking like her last chance. Of course, on some level, she’s aware she’s going to be marching down the aisle with Mr. Sensible soon enough.
For those of us watching this matrimonial crisis closely, the only question remaining prior to Iowa was whether there was time for one more folly before she came to her senses. We knew the identity of the one guy on a bar stool she hadn’t hooked up with, we just didn’t know if she’d have an opportunity to plant herself on the back of his Harley before reality set in. Well, as became evident in the last week before the Republicans caucused, the answer was yes.
As with each of her previous flings, she didn’t begin to know enough about this fellow before deciding he might be worth a tumble. Rick Santorum appears personable, boyish, and pleasant. He gives every indication of being an upright sort of person. But his politics are genuinely abhorrent, so far outside the American mainstream as to be almost Falangist. Once his views become more widely known, he would drive voters away in droves; with sufficient exposure, it’s unlikely he could carry a single state outside the deep South. The only reasons he did so well in Iowa are a) he was the last alternative still standing, and b) while he’s known to be conservative, a buzzword that makes Republicans salivate without requesting a definition, the full extent of his views aren’t well known at all, and would not survive scrutiny.
The battle isn’t quite over. Santorum hasn’t yet undergone the sort of examination that undid, in turn, Trump, Bachmann, Cain, Perry, and Gingrich. He might have time to make a little mischief in New Hampshire before that happens, and South Carolina might be congenial territory for him regardless. And he has a spirited, spiteful ally in Newt Gingrich. Gingrich feels aggrieved, and when Gingrich feels aggrieved, he gets mean. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he gets meaner. He must know he’s going down, but he’s going to do everything he can to pull Mitt Romney down with him. Pure personal vengeance. Many of Romney’s vulnerabilities are well enough known by now to occasion no surprise, but I think we’re going to see him suffer some serious new knife wounds, front and back, during the next few debates.
Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. But he will be a damaged nominee. Which isn’t to say he will lose — it’s much too early for those kinds of predictions — but it does mean his path to victory is steeper and more tortuous than it had to be.
Two other thoughts: President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray was, yes, an appropriate and justified exercise of executive power. But it was also, in a modest and opening-gambit sort of way, an announcement of how he is going to run for re-election this year: Like Harry Truman in 1948. His opponent will be not only Mitt Romney, but the Congressional Republican Party.
And most interestingly, I suspect Iowa may mark the turning point in the way the country views the Supreme Court’s recent, indefensible decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It was a decision most conservatives embraced when first issued, but the mischievous and entirely foreseeable consequences of this idiotic piece of jurisprudence are now visible for all to see. The fact that the State Supreme Court of a conservative state like Montana seems to agree has to be taken as a great big fat straw in the wind.
By: Erik Tarloff, The Atlantic, January 6, 2012
The GOP’s Peculiar Vocabulary Of Race
If Rick Santorum is upset that pretty much nobody believed him when he said he wasn’t talking about “black people” living off “somebody else’s money,” he has Newt Gingrich to blame. A day after the GOP’s flavor of the week changed stories and claimed, “I didn’t say black,” when he said, “I don’t want to make [something sounding like black] people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” Gingrich again called President Obama “the food stamp president.” He told reporters in New Hampshire, “I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”
On Thursday I performed the mental exercise of giving Santorum the benefit of the doubt, and laid out the way the GOP’s ’60s era rhetoric about “welfare queens” and “welfare cheats” has been updated to include much of the multiracial working class, including whites – including anyone who has a public sector job, a union-protected job, or collects unemployment, Social Security or Medicare. It seemed theoretically possible – while still hard to believe – that Santorum was merely sharing the new GOP line that we’re all welfare queens now, any of us who’ve ever benefited from a government program.
Then Gingrich made my thought exercise seem unduly kind, by demonstrating exactly why people should be inclined to distrust Santorum’s new story and believe he was talking about black people: The modern GOP seems unashamed of its prejudice.
It’s impossible not to believe that having our first black president unleashed a new round of GOP race-baiting, even leaving birtherism aside. In August, one of Obama’s few Republican friends, Sen. Tom Coburn, lapsed into shameful racial stereotyping trying to “defend” the president, telling an Oklahoma constituent that Obama’s “intent is not to destroy … It’s to create dependency because it worked so well for him … As an African-American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs.” A black guy raised by a (white) single mother gets into Harvard Law School: In the everyday vocabulary of today’s Republican Party, he’s looking for a handout.
Ronald Reagan wrapped up the ugly racism of earlier Republicans in pretty paper when he claimed, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” and made the case that welfare — which he associated with Democrats — created “dependency” that harmed its recipients. You didn’t have to be angry or racist anymore to oppose welfare programs; you could say you were trying to help their recipients. Reagan also muted the rhetoric that associated welfare with race, at least a little. More than 30 years later, having a black president makes it seem safe, and necessary, to unwrap Reagan’s pretty paper and once again make plain the GOP’s political association between welfare and African-Americans. Make that, having a black Democratic president. This wouldn’t happen to President Herman Cain, would it?
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 6, 2012
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