The Fake

During the GOP debate in Mesa, AZ, John King asked Representative Ron Paul why his new ads label former-senator Rick Santorum "a fake"? Paul replied, "because he is." That got a large laugh from the attendees in the performance arts center in Mesa, and it got Santorum's temper up, which is always a good place for it to be.

For the entire rest of the evening, Santorum proceeded with one excuse and rationalization after another to prove Paul correct. Hopefully the people of Arizona noticed, especially when he rationalized that the reason he spent so much time on Social Security and Medicare issues was "because all my rich seniors moved to Florida and Arizona." (I assume he meant Medicare prescription drug coverage, the biggest expansion of entitlements since the Johnson era.)

Earlier in the week we found out that four years ago Santorum declared 45 million American Protestants no longer to be Christians. Now he is accusing Arizona's massive retiree population of abandoning their social responsibilities back home in Pennsylvania. This sure is a strange approach for trying to win an election.

I'm not exactly sure that Santorum sounds like a liberal (as Paul accuses), but he sure doesn't sound like a conservative either--and he definitely isn't a libertarian. He mostly just sounds like an angry teenager who doesn't yet know what he wants to be when he grows up, but who does know that, whatever it is, he wants to judge and hurt people.

That should equally scare Catholics, Protestants, liberals, conservatives, and just about everyone else on the planet. The last thing America needs at this point is a president who is more temperamentally suited to working at Abu Graib than as a diplomatic peacemaker.