Bloodthirsty Liberal

I have to admit I’m kind of wanting Rick Santorum to go away. Not that I wouldn’t vote for him in the general election—I would—but I want to beat Obama, and, as a story I saw yesterday put it, he’s winning only the states Republicans would be expected to win in November anyway.

But he’s not without his charm:

“Santorum’s response to that liberal leftist in-the-tank-for-Obama press character really revealed some of Rick Santorum’s character,” she said. “And it was good, and it was strong, and it was about time because he’s saying enough is enough of the liberal media twisting the conservative’s words, putting words in his mouth, taking things out of context and even just making things up.”

Palin encouraged more of that from Santorum and his Republican competitors on the campaign trail.

“So, when I heard Rick Santorum’s response I was like, ‘Well, welcome to my world Rick, and good on ya. Don’t retreat. You are saying enough is enough.’ And I was glad that he called out this reporter. He and the other candidates, all of them, they need to do more of this because believe me, the American people are tired of what that leftist media continues to do to conservatives.”

This is the same reporter, by the way, who slobbered over Obama so much, the latter had to ask for a roll of Bounty paper towels:

I started calling it the “liberal-media complex” after Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, but I think Breitbart coined a better term: the “Democrat-media complex.” It amounts to the same thing, but it makes the point a little more pointedly.

PS: I still sort of want Santorum to go away.

What a knucklehead

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Thursday said Republicans should give President Barack Obama another term if Santorum isn’t the GOP nominee and for a second day compared rival Mitt Romney to an Etch A Sketch toy.

Santorum reiterated an argument he has made before: The former Massachusetts governor is not conservative enough to offer voters a clear choice in the fall election and that only he can provide that contrast.

“You win by giving people a choice,” Santorum said during a campaign stop in Texas. “You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there.”

Santorum added: “If they’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk of what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate for the future.”

Do you suppose that logic will be used again and again in the general election?

- Aggie

He calls it Plan B

I’m so glad that we’re talking about this. The beginning has to do with the ground work that W. F. Buckley laid when he told conservatives that Goldwater would lose in a landslide, but that they were working to build a coalition that would bear fruit down the road. He then suggests that neither Romney or Santorum is electable, but that the important mission is to control the House and work to regain the Senate. He has apparently given up on the Presidency.

If nominated, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum might not cause such subtraction. Both are conservatives, although of strikingly different stripes. Neither, however, seems likely to be elected. Neither has demonstrated, or seems likely to develop, an aptitude for energizing a national coalition that translates into 270 electoral votes.

If either is nominated, conservatives should vote for him. But suppose the accumulation of evidence eventually suggests that the nomination of either would subtract from the long-term project of making conservatism intellectually coherent and politically palatable. If so, there would come a point when, taking stock of reality, conservatives turn their energies to a goal much more attainable than, and not much less important than, electing Romney or Santorum president. It is the goal of retaining control of the House and winning control of the Senate.

Several possible Supreme Court nominations and the staffing of the regulatory state are among the important reasons conservatives should try to elect whomever the GOP nominates. But conservatives this year should have as their primary goal making sure Republicans wield all the gavels in Congress in 2013.

If Republicans do, their committee majorities will serve as fine-mesh filters, removing President Obama’s initiatives from the stream of legislation. Then Republicans can concentrate on what should be the essential conservative project of restoring something like constitutional equipoise between the legislative and executive branches.

Given what a terrible President Obama has been, this is depressing. But it speaks to the weakness and I would argue the lack of coming to terms with reality, in the Republican field. Obama should have been beatable, just on the question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? They should have focused on health care and on the economy. On the debt. On the astonishing waste of money and what that meant to individuals and to the country as a whole. Instead, we got sidetracked into silly conversations about contraception, which simply turns most women and most men off. Completely. What were they thinking?

PS: Krauthammer agrees with me on Santorum

- Aggie

[Click here.]

Ha-ha, just kidding.

Don’t tell NOW or Planned Parenthood (a euphemism if there ever was one), but some women think something else:

GOP strategists have openly worried that the recent focus on social issues could sink Santorum’s chances among female voters in a general election and even doom his candidacy for the nomination among Republican women. But midway through their Michigan caravan, Gallagher said she has seen just the opposite, as women turn out at Santorum rallies to show their support for the former Pennsylvania senator.

“What I think women are responding to as they get to know Rick is that he is a good man,” Gallagher said. “You don’t see guys like that in politics very much.”

She called the contraception issue in particular “political clutter” and observed that Santorum’s willingness to stand by the position that he personally opposes contraception may actually have helped him among conservative women, who are looking for a leader willing to stand their ground on issues they care about. She also said that the perception that all women are liberal and pro-choice, and so would be alienated by Santorum’s positions on social issues, is wrong.

“The political narrative that women are liberal and pro-choice may be true of half the country, but the other half really care very deeply about marriage and religious liberty, and Rick Santorum is their champion,” she said. “It’s certainly not a problem for Republican women that Rick is a faithful Catholic.”

…

“The tide is turning in this country. More and more women are pro-life, and they’re looking for heroes on the issue,” says Musgrave, a former Colorado congresswoman who is a vice president of the SBA List. “We can always count on Rick Santorum.”

Musgrave also said that Santorum’s personal story, including his eight children, has won over numbers of women who see him as a devoted husband and father.

“They’re very drawn to the way Rick Santorum relates to his wife and children and the way he relates to Bella,” she said, speaking of Sanoturm’s youngest daughter, who has a life-threatening genetic disorder. “He has that strength of character, but he has that tenderness as he relates to his wife and his children that is just amazing.”

I guess you could say these women think about abortion, too—at least sometimes—they just think about it differently.

And they have company:

Alan Steinberg, a New Jersey political commentator who has been advocating for a more conservative alternative to Romney, suggested that whatever support Santorum would lose among more moderate Jews he would make up in support among Jewish conservatives.

“His stance on social issues will be a plus, particularly in the Orthodox community,” he said. “He will have the Orthodox, Jewish conservatives and the pro-Israel community that is pro-Netanyahu and pro-Likud.”

John Milton, call your agent!

Rick Santorum offered no apologies Tuesday for a controversial speech he gave in 2008 when he talked about the threat of Satan in America.

“I’m a person of faith. I believe in good and evil,” Santorum said in response to questions from CNN.

…

“If somehow or another because you’re a person of faith and you believe in good and evil is a disqualifier for president, we’re going to have a very small pool of candidates who can run for president,” Santorum said.

You know what? He’s right!

“I don’t know what’s newsmaking that Rick Santorum believes in right and wrong, good and evil, God and the devil,” says one campaign aide. “I really don’t know how that’s out of the mainstream.”

It’s not. In 2007, the Gallup polling organization asked Americans whether they believe in God, in heaven, in hell, and in the devil. The results: 86 percent of those questioned said they believed in God, 81 percent in heaven, 70 percent in the devil, and 69 percent in hell.

Just 21 percent of those questioned said they do not believe in the devil, giving Satan a healthy 70-21 believe/disbelieve ratio. (Eight percent said they weren’t sure.)

I live among (to use a Mark Steyn phrase) the soi-disant intellectual elite here in the upper-right corner of America (upper-left if you’re Beelzebub), so we don’t talk this way. We’re not used to it. If Satan supported same-sex marriage and abortion on demand, he’d still poll 48% among our electorate. If he called for in-state tuition for illegal aliens and legalization of pot, he’d serve longer than Barney Frank and John Kerry combined (not that Kerry goes that way).

But I accept, I am encouraged, that other people do believe in Satan. I believe in good and evil. I believe there is a difference, and that it can be determined by the mind of man. And I believe evil must be countered, confronted, contained, and ultimately defeated at the earliest possible opportunity. Or someone gets hurt.

If Santorum (and the rest of the 70%) call it Satan, what’s that to me?

PS: How can CNN call the speech “controversial”, when no one mentioned it for four years?

Just asking.

Just by way of analysis, not meaning to be pro- or anti-Romney’s candidacy — but can anybody give me even a halfway convincing explanation for why the commentariat thinks that Mitt Romney is so much more electable than some of the other GOP candidates? (And no, polls don’t count: Polls aren’t actual analysis, and head-to-head polls for next fall mean absolutely nothing at this stage of a race other than a rough sense of name ID. If they did, Jimmy Carter would have beaten Ronald Reagan by 32 points.)

I bring this article to your attention because it analyzes each of the Republican candidates. If you’re too lazy for the click, here’s the upshot: Perry has never lost a race, but has grievously underperformed so far, and Santorum has won all but one election.

- Aggie

Leave it to Mark Steyn to wrap up the Left’s diseased hatred in a pretty rhetorical bow:

The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

That’s it.

Oh, you want more? Very well… glutton:

There is something telling about what Peter Wehner at Commentary rightly called the “casual cruelty” of Eugene Robinson. The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers — Robinson describes his newspaper column as “a license to feel.” Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death — or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.

President Empathy once said he wouldn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby”, remember.

You want more? What is your problem?

Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

Never mind the dead kid, he has six living kids. How crazy freaky weird is that?

This crazy freaky weird: All those self-evidently ludicrous risible surplus members of the Santorum litter are going to be paying the Social Security and Medicare of all you normal well-adjusted Boomer yuppies who had one designer kid at 39. So, if it helps make it easier to “empathize,” look on them as sacrificial virgins to hurl into the bottomless pit of Big Government debt.

You asked for it:

Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?

Albeit less dramatically than “Doctor” Gosnell, much of the developed world has ruptured the compact between past, present, and future. A spendthrift life of self-gratification is one thing. A spendthrift life paid for by burdening insufficient numbers of children and grandchildren with crippling debt they can never pay off is utterly contemptible. And to too many of America’s politico-media establishment it’s not in the least bit “weird.”

Steyn can toss this off seemingly at the drop of a hat. But he feels it. He “empathizes”. This is why (and this is how) I’m a conservative.

Those of you who’ve been lurking here to know what BTL and Aggie think about Iowa (hi mom!) have been disappointed. We don’t think about Iowa; at least, I don’t. There’s nothing to think about a state I don’t know well, where not a single vote has been cast, and which doesn’t really hold an election as much as a show of hands.

That’s all fine; it’s their state. Just don’t ask us to get excited about it.

That said, last night has given us the first blurry Polaroid of the race.

The Republican presidential candidates propelled out of the Iowa caucuses Wednesday with the race looking dramatically different than it did just one week ago.

Mitt Romney won the night, but only by one of the slimmest margins in Iowa election history.

Rick Santorum landed a second-place finish just eight votes behind Romney, turning a stunning performance out of his long-shot bid for the nomination and ending up toe-to-toe with the presumed frontrunner of the national campaign.

Iowa GOP Chairman Matt Strawn reported the official vote count at 30,015 for Romney and 30,007 for Santorum. Each candidate pulled in about 25 percent.

The results allow each candidate to reasonably claim momentum going into the next race.

The race seems old already, but they only just fired the starting pistol. Sure, Michele Bachmann looked fine in her Flo-Jo running suit; Rick Perry had the hair; Herman Cain had the hat; and Newt Gingrich had the wives. But Rick Santorum got the votes. (The less said about Huntsman the better.)

The rest was noise.

As much air as has been expelled and ink spilled over Iowa the last few months, no one will care or remember tomorrow. It’s on the New Hampshire, where Romney will win and I’m sure Santorum will do well. Then South Carolina, and on and on. Romney has the advantage of “organization”, but I’ve always found organization isn’t the same as votes. (Who had more organization the Hillary?) Santorum (or whoever) can win even if he’s out-organized and outspent if he out-polls the other guys.

There, that’s my wisdom, such as it is. Don’t overthink this. It’s just politics.