Alternate Reality Show

Super Tuesday in this election cycle is a lot less super than in previous years.  By the time the March 6 votes are counted, only about a third of the delegates to the Republican nominating convention will have been determined.  That unfortunately means that we will have to endure several more months of the Republican alternate reality show that their Presidential primary has become.  We'll have to listen to more misinformation about Obama and his policies, more attacks against him, and more pandering to the right wing nutters that have taken over the party.  The only good thing is that their backers will be pouring a lot more money into the remaining primaries and theoretically that should take something away from what they have to spend on the general election.  I say theoretically because Citizens United has unleashed a huge amount of corporate and  SuperPac cash. 

Of the various egregious comments made by the contenders (and former and wannabe contenders), perhaps the two most absurd were by Rick Santorum.  The first was at a Tea Party rally in Columbus Ohio.  Santorum said the “president’s agenda” is “not about you. It’s not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your job...It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology.  Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology.”  Obama deputy press secretary Ben LaBolt rightly referred to the comments as the “latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, searing pessimism and negativity." 

If Rick Santorum would read his Bible more carefully, he'd see that concern for the poor is present in both the Old and New Testament.  The Reverend Jim Wallis tells a story about some theology students who snipped out all sections of the Bible that dealt with the poor and social justice. The result looked like a large pile of thinly-sliced Swiss cheese. Health care, living wages, the environment, and eradication of poverty are religious as well as political issues.  I'm not sure Santorum would get the same result if he cut out the passages dealing with contraception.

The next came when he criticized Obama's apology for the burning of the Quran at the American base north of Kabul, saying that it "showed weakness."  Santorum evidently thought that since the burning may not have been deliberate, no apology was necessary.  Oh, and when you accidentally destroy something of value, you have no need to apologize?  Santorum has a profound insensitivity and misunderstanding of the impact of these actions.  But then again. former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey had then Senator Santorum pegged when Santorum first came to the Senate.  "Santorum, that's Latin for asshole," Kerrey quipped. 

In both instances, Santorum's comments played to the Tea Party wing whose members show up in force in the Republican primaries.  This small fraction being almost uniformly old and white, they are not in any way indicative of the general population of the United States.  Timothy Egan said it well in a February 16 New York Times Op-Ed piece.  "...we know an election of great significance is happening on the Republican side. But it’s occurring in a different place, guided by talk-radio extremists and religious zealots, with only a vague resemblance to the states where it has taken place. From this small world have emerged a host of nutty, retrograde positions, unpopular with the vast American majority."  Amen.