The Deranged Chorus
A Catholic former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania once rated the dumbest man in the US Congress crested Tuesday night in Iowa’s see-saw battle among candidates for the Republican nomination and ran a virtual tie with Mormon millionaire Mitt Romney. Well after chilly midnight on caucus night in the Midwestern state, Iowa’s Republican Party declared Romney the winner by 8 votes, a count that Santorum will inevitably question and perhaps contest. Each hovered just below 30,000 votes, with libertarian Republican Ron Paul of Texas running third with a respectable 26,000-plus votes. IMAGE: Rick Santorum
Only a couple of weeks ago Newt Gingrich seem poised for exactly the same unexpected surge that blessed Santorum across the last week. But battered by volleys of viciously negative campaign ads financed by big Republican money backing Romney, Gingrich ran fourth with just under 16,000 votes. Hobbling along in the rear came Texas governor Rick Perry, Tea Party star Michele Bachmann and – with 668 votes – Utah millionaire Jon Huntsman.
Exactly four years ago, Santorum’s surprise showing last night was prefigured by the upset victory of a Protestant evangelical, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who won with 41,000 votes, Romney came second on that occasion with 30,000 votes, a little more more than he managed yesterday, with a similar 25 per cent of the vote. Third, with 15,000 votes came the man who actually won the Republican nomination, John McCain.
So, as far as Republicans are concerned, Iowa can be a poor predictor. On January 10 the surviving candidates will be going head to head in New Hampshire. Romney has spent months in the state and has one of his several dreary homes there. Santorum, who committed months of seemingly fruitless effort clasping the hands of countless Iowans, has little presence in New Hampshire and a tiny war chest of campaign cash. Romney’s big-money attack dogs who were too busy battering Gingrich in Iowa to notice Santorum’s late surge, will unleash a torrent of abuse via tv and radio.
New Hampshire is a must-win for Romney if he is to escape the charge that he simply can’t clinch any race. Two debates are scheduled and an embittered Newt Gingrich, no slouch in the campaign-debate setting, will be quivering to get his revenge.
Watching the Iowa results with some satisfaction are Obama’s campaign chieftains. To them, the Iowa contest showed that Iowa’s Republicans simply couldn’t figure out who to vote for. No one pleased them for long. Bachmann, Perry, Cain and Gingrich each had their moment in the sun, then faded. A week ago Ron Paul seemed set to win. Had the Iowa vote been held a week from now, Santorum might too have been eclipsed and Huntsman limped to the front.
The Republican high command decided some time ago that Romney is their best chance of beating Obama. Though infinitely elastic in political doctrine he’s not a nut. It’s imaginable that the all-important independent voters in the general election in the fall could vote for him. He made his millions buying and selling companies, very often firing workers in the process. He governed Massachusetts without egregious failure, passing the precursor to Obama’s health insurance reform, which achievement has been a red rag to the conservatives, who regard him as (a) a crypto-liberal and (b) an agent of Satan, since he is a Mormon. No mormon has ever been president and reservation about the Church of Latterday Saints extends beyond conservatives. For example, Mormon theology is not friendly to the children of Ham.
Troubling to this same Republican high command is Ron Paul who has won passionate adherents across the political spectrum. The right likes him for his libertarian economics, which prompt Paul to denounce the basic elements of the social safety net – Social Security and Medicare. He would abolish the Federal Reserve ( a laudable objective). He’s a gold bug, and in his speech to his supporters last night he shouted a line which I’ll hazard has never before been uttered on an election night podium – “We’re all Austrians now” – thereby proclaiming his allegiance to the economist Ludwig van Mises and parodying the line actually coined by Milton Friedman, though often attributed to Richard Nixon, “We’re all Keynesians now.”
A lot of leftists like Paul because he really is an ardent anti-imperialist – the only one in the race – vigorously denouncing America’s wars, its overseas bases and its alliance with Israel. He’s also an eloquent foe of the imperial presidency and of constitutional abuses such as the law signed by Obama on December 31, giving the military a role in domestic enforcement against terrorists and opening US citizens to military detention without benefit of counsel, without charges, and without trial,
Part of Paul’s vote in Iowa was undoubtedly leftists who, under Iowa’s rules, could cross over and vote in the Republican caucus. Republicans fear that if Paul gets sufficiently incensed at his treatment by their party, he might bolt and run on the Libertarian third party ticket, thereby draining votes from the Republican candidate next November. For their part the Obama forces similarly fear that Paul would steal vital left votes from those thoroughly disillusioned with the President. In the run-up to the Iowa vote The New York Times ran more than one aggressive onslaught on Paul for newsletters, racist in content, which ran under Paul’s name twenty years ago, and which he has since disavowed.
It’s hard to imagine Santorum getting long term traction. He’s a very conservative Catholic who crept into the US senate in 1998 after the incumbent Pennsylvania senator, John Heinz. It’s hard to imagine him cutting a wide swathe through the Baptist south, though against Romney, who knows?
Santorum says that as president he would bomb Iran tomorrow. Romney and Gingrich don’t lag far behind in their ravings against the Islamic Republic. Obama ratchets up sanctions against Iran while supposedly telling Netanyahu that the US will not endorse any attack by Israel on Iran. Only Ron Paul stands out against this deranged chorus. Given a chance, I’ll vote for Paul, even though he hasn’t a prayer of taking over the Oval Office. One has to draw the line somewhere, though I don’t feel in the least Austrian.
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at: alexandercockburn@asis.com
________
Santorum: “That’s Latin for Asshole”
Editors’ Note: In honor of Rick Santorum’s sudden emergence in the Iowa caucuses as the anti-Romney du jour, CounterPunch is reprinting this 2003 profile of the Pennsylvania zealot about his career in the United States senate, where he was almost universally reviled as both stupid and mean by his colleagues and staff. –AC / JSC
Rick Santorum had only been in the senate for a few weeks when Bob Kerrey, then Senator from Nebraska, pegged him. “Santorum, that’s Latin for asshole.” It was probably the funniest line the grim Kerrey ever uttered and it was on the mark, too.
Such a stew of sleazy self-righteousness and audacious stupidity has not been seen in the senate since the days of Steve Symms, the celebrated moron from Idaho. In 1998, investigative reporter Ken Silverstein fingered Santorum as the dumbest member of congress in a story for The Progressive. Considering the competition, that’s an achievement of considerable distinction.
Even Santorum’s staff knows the senator is a vacuous boob prone to outrageous gaffs and crude outbursts of unvarnished bigotry. For years, they kept him firmly leashed, rarely permitting him to attend a press interview without a senior staffer by his side. They learned the hard way. While in serving in the House, Santorum was asked by a reporter to explain why his record on environmental policy was so dreadful. Santorum replied by observing that the environment was of little consequence in God’s grand plan. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here 100 years from now.” The reference was to the Rapture, which apparently is impending.
Santorum is the self-anointed prophet of family values on the Hill, who issues frequent jeremiads on the threats Hollywood fare poses to the “fabric of American culture.” Of course, these sermons are hard to swallow from a man with Santorum’s resume. After all, before entering Congress Santorum worked as a lobbyist. His top client? The World Wrestling Federation.
But now the Republican leadership, apparently cruising along in self-destruct mode, has elevated Santorum to the number three spot in the senate and his staff can’t run interference for him anymore. The results have been comically predictable. Six months ago, Santorum penned an op-ed for a Christian paper blaming the sexual molestation scandals in the Catholic Church on “the culture of liberalism.” Surely, an omen that the senator from Pennsylvania wasn’t quite ready for prime time.
So it came to pass that on April 7, Santorum sat down for an interview with AP reporter Lara Jordan. He should have been on his guard. After all, Jordan is married to Jim Jordan, who oversees John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz, despises Santorum. He inherited the senate seat left open when her previous husband, John Heinz, perished in a plane crash. “Santorum is critical of everything, indifferent to nuance, and incapable of compromise,” Heinz said. This should have been a warning signal to Santorum that the interview with Jordan might be hostile terrain, but his intellectual radar seems to function about as well as Baghdad’s air defense system. Post-war, that is.
After a brisk discussion of the degeneracy of American culture, the interview turned to the subject of the pending Supreme Court case on sodomy laws. Like most religious zealots, Santorum is obsessed not just with homosexuals but with visualizing the postures and physical mechanics of homosexual love. He seized on her question with an enthusiasm many Republicans reserve for discussions of the tax code.
“I have no problem with homosexuality,” Santorum pronounced. “I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who’s homosexual. If that’s their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.”
In the past, one of Santorum’s staffers would have found some way to interrupt the interview and deftly muzzle the senator. But he was flying solo and evidently trying to impress Ms. Jordan with his encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Krafft-Ebbing. Note the senator’s excited and flirtatious tone.
AP: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?
SANTORUM: We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that [have] sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold – Griswold was the contraceptive case – and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you – this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it’s my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong, healthy families. Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, where it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.
“Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. 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
At this point, even the unnerved reporter tried to rein in Santorum. “I’m sorry,” Jordan interjected. “I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.”
But the man was on a roll and there was no stopping him. “And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately,” Santorum said. “The idea is that the state doesn’t have
rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there
are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society.”
There you have it. A case study in the politics of pathological homophobia. Despite outcries from gay Republicans, Bush stood by Santorum in his hour of media martyrdom: “The president believes the senator is an inclusive man,” Ari Fleishcer informed the press. “And that’s what he believes.” Santorum’s pal Tom Delay, the pest exterminator-turned-Republican House Majority Leader, was ebullient. He called Santorum’s remarks “courageous.”
Trent Lott must be snickering in the senate cloakroom.
Santorum, the Mullah Omar of Pennsylvania, is a ridiculous spectacle but he can’t be taken lightly. He is the slick-haired darling of the neo-cons, an obedient automaton that feverishly promotes their wildest fantasies without hesitation.
Undeterred by the First Amendment, Santorum says planning to introduce legislation that will limit criticism of Israel in colleges and universities that receive federal money.
And his passion for Israel is so profound that it obviates even his rancid homophobia. When it comes to the Middle East, liberal Democrats race to co-sponsor legislation with him. Most recently, Santorum and Barbara Boxer teamed up to introduce the Syria Accountability Act, which would inflict trade sanctions on Syria like those which gripped Iraq for 12 years, killing nearly one million children. Talk about family values.
Sure, Santorum is an asshole. But he’s not one of a kind.
Jeffrey St. Clair’s latest book is Born Under a Bad Sky. He is the co-editor of Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
¶
ADVERT PRO NOBIS
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
IF YOU THINK THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA ARE A DISGRACE AND A HUGE OBSTACLE
to real change in America why haven’t you sent at least a few dollars to The Greanville Post (or a similar anti-corporate citizen’s media?). Think about it. Without educating and organizing our ranks our cause is DOA. That’s why our new citizens’ media need your support. Send your badly needed check to “TGP, P.O. Box 1028, Brewster, NY 10509-1028.” Make checks out to “P. Greanville/ TGP”. (A contribution of any amount can also be made via Paypal and MC or VISA.)
THANK YOU.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
