Rick Transit Gloria Mundi



Unintelligent Design

 Try as I might, I have been unable to escape the voice and visage of Rick Santorum, the overgrown Boy Scout engaged in a futile struggle to contain the psychosis bubbling just beneath the surface of his prim sweater vest. The guy even has his name creepily embroidered on his trademark couture. Why? Does he have parochial school flashbacks of getting lost after being left off at the wrong bus stop? I wouldn't be surprised if he had his phone number Sharpie-marked on an Opus Dei sackcloth undershirt too.

Just when we thought the Republican freak show had reached its apogee with Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum has burst forth in all his glory, fire and brimstone, spiked garter belts and chains. Even his own daughter inadvertently admits that he is demented. "So, here we go", she blogged last summer on Backstage with the Santorums. "We are out of the gates and into the race … and what a crazy journey it will be!"

Actually, Daddy did not so much decide to run for president, as he was called by God. In the same blog entry, Elizabeth Santorum writes that it took "months of discernment" for "Our Father", as she calls him, to announce. Not discussions with the family, nor talks with think tanks and pollsters. Discernment is a Catholic theological term, a form of soul-searching and meditation so intense that one can reach the point of literal arousal by the Holy Spirit. It goes way beyond prayer. It's what happens when a religious person is "called" by God to a vocation as a priest or nun. I think it is fairly obvious that Rick Santorum is not so much running for public office as he is on a one-man crusade to impose his medievalist oddball fantasies on an unsuspecting body politic.

Direct from the Eldest Daughter of the Santorum Cult/Clan:

Yesterday was a big day in the Santorum household. After long months of discernment, my father has decided to run for president of the United States of America. This morning, as I drove my sister Sarah Maria to school, she looked over at me and said, “Wow. I think I’m still absorbing how important yesterday was!” I had to agree.  
So, I’ll give a recap of yesterdays “behind the scenes” excitement. My Dad spent the morning doing radio and television interviews, while my Mom and I got all six of my siblings ready to go. As you can imagine, getting everyone ready is never an easy task. From “Oh no, did you pack the hairbrush?” to “Patrick, those had better not be grass stains on your khakis,” let’s just say that we averted several minor crises. Bella is often the easiest to get ready because she always looks adorable in whatever she’s wearing. Her sweet smile and peaceful demeanor are a constant source of joy for our family.   

What a typical family, right down to the authentic dialogue, huh? But I have one quibble. Elizabeth says she drove her younger sister to school. Aren't the Santorum spawn all supposed to be home-schooled by the parents? At least, that is what Dad brags about. Or are the kids driven around the block a few times before they are dropped right back at Home School?  Is Home School the name of an elite private academy nestled amidst the Homeland Security complex in Northern Virginia, where the Santorums have a home and initially got Pennsylvania state funding for their Home School? I emailed the campaign to ask, but they have not yet replied. Do I discern a brush-off?

 (The Santorum sons did go to an all-boys Catholic school in Washington, DC for a time -- see above Opus Dei link. The place was so insulated that rumor had it that secular mothers put condoms in their son's Christmas stockings.)

The Ricktus (he has the preternatural grin of a surprised corpse) was all over the TV this morning, rantsoruming about Obama's "phony ideology." Unfortunately, he is not complaining about  presidential corporatism or crony capitalism or even the usual straw-man socialism, because Rick unabashedly adores the One Percent God. Monuments and statues are erected in honor of the titans of industry and finance, says Rick, who probably missed the chapters on heresy and idol worship in Catechism Class. It is the Gospel of Inequality Rulz!

He also seems to take the story of Adam and Eve quite literally. He sunk even deeper into his own primordial ooze when he told one TV interviewer that Obama is wrong to put the fate of the earth before Man, who shall have dominion over it:

"I wasn't suggesting the president's not a Christian. I accept the fact the president's a Christian. I just said that when you have a world view that elevates the world above man, and says that we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth by things that are frankly just not scientifically proven, like for example the politicization of the whole global warming debate, I mean this is just all an attempt to centralize power and give more power to the government. This is not questioning the president's beliefs in Christianity. I'm talking about the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth, and have dominion on it, and be good stewards of it."

The anti-Environmental Protection Agency crowd must have loved this. The checks from the polluting Koch Brothers are in the mail even as we speak.

Rick, along with alcoholic Arizona Governor Jan Drinkwine Brewer, also seems to have a severed head fetish. In his Saturday column, New York Times writer Charles Blow recounts how Santorum has actually foretold the Second Coming of the French Revolution:

Also last week, he suggested that liberals and the president were leading religious people into oppression and even beheadings. I kid you not. Santorum said: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”

Obama as Robespierre. Ohhh-kay. Somebody needs to stage an intervention. Or a casting call for The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade!