The new Washington Monthly guy notes that the wingerati is attacking Rick Santorum as too far right. Good luck making that charge work in a Republican primary:
It’s been an implicit part of the rules of engagement in the GOP presidential race that no candidate can be criticized for being too conservative, particularly by Mitt Romney. Thus Rick Perry drew fire not for flirting with secession and nullification theories, or for complaining about “lucky ducky” poor folks who didn’t pay taxes—but for expressing sympathy for the children of undocumented workers. Similarly, Newt Gingrich never got attacked for his anti-Muslim demagoguery or his regular descriptions of the president as a “secular-socialist”—but for once professing belief in the climate change “hoax” and criticizing Ronald Reagan.
[….]As I write this, the top of the Drudge Report has one of those screaming headline “stories” about Santorum’s “Satan Warning”—along with excerpts from the 2008 Ave Maria speech that us liberals have been discussing for the last several days. Drudge very specifically includes a quote from Santorum’s disparagement of mainline Protestants as having left “the world of Christianity.”
Meanwhile, WaPo blogger Rubin has a long, inflammatory post calling Santorum a “reactionary”—not a term you hear often in the Right Blogosphere these days—for talking about theology and contraception and in general “seeking to obliterate the national consensus on a range of issues beyond gay marriage and abortion.”
My feeling is you can’t be too young, too thin, or too right-wing in a Republican primary. Santo ought to amp it up, if anything
Jewish Steel
Nothing tastes as good as crazy feels.
Brachiator
If you are Santorum, you cannot ever, ever, EVER, be too frothy.
4tehlulz
The Washington Elite is looking down its nose at you!
He doesn’t even have to change the speech.
trollhattan
Rih is just a monkey man,
Jennifer Ruben is a monkey woman too.
dr. bloor
No shit. He should come out in full armor for every campaign speech, and start promising a new round of crusades if he’s elected.
p.a.
let no one inform SanScrotum the election is about being POTUS; he seems to be running fo the office of Chief Inquisitor, and let him continue . The crackup should be awesome.
freelancer
How does he ratchet it up when he’s already at eleven?
Ash Can
My guess is that said wingerati are recognizing just how unelectable Santorum would be in the general, so they’re trying to knock him back down. If the American electorate at large, and specifically the great middle swath of “independent” voters, weren’t recoiling from the guy in horror, they’d be singing his praises in three-part harmony.
Schlemizel
AMP IT UP!? Oh god no, not until he has the nomination sewn up. Once he is the GOP candidate he can turn it to 12 or 13 but til then we don’t want him flaming his talibinical base
jl
My hope springs eternal for a total GOP primary trainwreck.
TPM reports that Romney relies almost exclusively on big donors, who are almost at their contribution limits, and Romney is spending faster than he is getting. So will he be short of money? I would guess Super PAC money would jump in, but how effective will that be while Mitt has to find some new sugar daddy contributors?
And Michigan may be tied.
More mess the better.
As for wingnut crazy, so far the kind motherly advice the candidates seem to be getting is ‘If Newt and Rih jump of a cliff into bottomless crazy, that means you should jump of a cliff into bottomless crazy.’
To the extent that crazy extreme GOP 27 percenters are the GOP primary voting base, no such thing as too extreme or too crazy.
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
And Rubin is getting crucified for it in every single right-wing bile outlet save for WaPo.
david mizner
Jennifer Rubin is a neocon; she’s probably genuinely put off by Santorum’s Christian, vagina-probing craziness. Most neocons are fairly liberal on social issues and have hitched themselves to the GOP because they see it as the best vehicle for starting wars and killing Muslims.
jl
@Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity: Excellent. Bwa ha ha ha! Excellent. Hope they show that peacenik DFH communist Rubin what real All American conservatism.
Suffern ACE
So the preeminent gay right-wing blogger and the bloodlusty woman are concerned that the parts of the 1960s they personally don’t mind aren’t protected or given a special consideration.
Mark S.
I don’t really agree with Kilgore. Ricky insulting tens of millions of non-fundie Protestants is news, and Rubin is hardly the first person to think Santorum is a tad too extreme to do very well in a general election. I don’t really see Mitt’s fingerprints all over this like I did with Herman Cain’s explosion.
DanielX
Bring on the wingularity!
ericblair
The mistake I see Rih making is to start attacking other Christian sects as Not Real Christians. Already. You’re supposed to put on a front of bullshit fellowship with your brothers in Christ until the ungodly and blasphemers are safely neutralized or converted, and then you can start in on purifying the heretics.
But no, since Rih has godliness spewing uncontrollably out of multiple orifices, he’s just got to start in on the heretics already, which tends to fuck up the whole capture strategy here.
dmsilev
@jl: That article, and similar ones elsewhere, were amazing. If we assume that the Romney campaign had the same burn rate in Feb as they reported in Jan, the campaign itself will have burned through its entire cash-on-hand by about this time next week. His SuperPAC is in better shape; they’d run out of cash in late March.
Combined with the tapped-out donors for the campaign itself, it means that Romney is going to have to go almost entirely SuperPAC. SuperPACs tear down other candidates; negative ads are what they do. Romney, on the other hand, badly needs to build himself up (his approval ratings are abysmal).
Julia Grey
In their minds, “killing Muslims” equates to “protecting Israel,” which is the first priority of the neo-con. If they thought killing Catholic newborns before baptism would “protect Israel,” they’d be all for that.
Richard
No candidate can be too insane for the GOP base.
Santorum has suggested Obama is not a true Christian and compared him to Hitler. I can only imagine that his next step is a pledge to execute Obama after conducting an inquisition if elected President.
feebog
The Wingnuts suddenly realized Frothy is not just a Christian, he is a Christian Dominist, and that won’t fly int the general election. Establishment Republicans are definitely swinging into full defcon 5 mode. Reap what you sow Motherfuckers, couldn’t happen to a nicer party,
Mark S.
@Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity:
Is she really? Man, these idiots really can’t take anything but the most stringent ideological purity.
KG
@freelancer: my only thought is this…
xkcd.com/670/
The Populist
I read an article that laid out the fact that moderate GOP voters love Ricky as a man of INTEGRITY.
Note to Obama and his handlers: If Ricky somehow wins the nomination, start trotting out his various floor speeches and his voting record. Ricky was even listed as one of the more CORRUPT senators serving in his time.
Yep, enjoy the man of INTEGRITY. Yawn.
The Populist
@feebog: …and he’s a man of integrity doncha know!
The rank and file scare me sometimes.
Violet
Santorum just needs to keep reminding GOP voters that Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Outside of Utah and a few other states, that’s enough to cause Romney to lose most GOP primaries.
Culture of Truth
Indeed, I consider Santorum soft on Satan.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
You certainly can’t when all your choices are political nitwits, or egomaniacs. Santorum doesn’t scare me, he wears his belief on his shirt sleeves, and outside the deepest fundie world, most wingers use religion as more a tool than a prime issue. The braintrust wants the one percenters protected first, and then the rubes can tinker with religious bloviation.
And such fire breathing old testy bible thumping is going to turn all but the GOP base off, and they cannot win that way. And most wingers know this. The danger is when some winger comes along, with the basic beliefs of a Santorum/Gingrich meld, AND possesses the air of thoughtfullness like an Obama and the charisma of a REagan. I don’t see any one on the horizon that fits that bill. But if one pops up anytime soon, I will prepare for the Apocalypse and read up on the anti christ. Maybe watch the Omen series again, after all these years.
Anoniminous
@dmsilev:
The ever reoccurring story of this GOP presidential nominating campaign is the desperate search by the GOP Fundie-Con base for a Not-Romney. The Peculiar People (Dobson, et. al.) decided on Santorum and so far their pick is doing pretty good. In a week and a couple of hours we’ll have a good idea how many votes the Peculiar People can deliver.
In the meantime we can sit back and watch a battle between a 100% (more-or-less) Top/Down campaign (Romney) and a 100% (more-or-less) grassroots effort (Santorum.)
Brachiator
@Anoniminous:
The Village is alive with feverish dreams of a deadlocked GOP convention, and Jeb Bush rising from the ashes to save a party which is caught between a Mitt and a Frothy place.
MarkJ
I think that crack about Protestants having left the world of Christianity might leave a mark. The Protestants started all this right wing religious culture war crapola. Catholics are Johnny come latelys to the party. Santorum calling protestants less Christian might turn some of them against him.
Best case scenario is this is he too Christian thing opens up the Catholic-Protestant fissure and collaterally drags in the weirdo Mormon cult issue by association. Then we watch the sparks fly and the whole Party burn down and fall apart over religious differences. I’m not sure God is kind enough to give us the enjoyment of watching that happen.
schrodinger's cat
BTW why should Obama’s religion matter? Do you have to be Christian to be a “Real American”? What does it matter if a Presidential candidate is an atheist or Jewish or Hindu or Muslim or most importantly a follower of the Ceiling Cat with Tunch as his prophet?
MattF
Yeah, the “no enemies to my right” dynamic has hit rougher waters. For a reference point on reactionary politics, there’s Joseph de Maistre:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre
Santorum comes pretty close to de Maistre, IMO.
Added: A nice quote from the Wiki article:
“a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner.”
Cap'n Swag
Hey, Doug J, where did the “Santo” thing start? I’ve seen Halperin repeatedly referring to him as that over at Drudge Lite, but had never caught that before.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@schrodinger’s cat:
It doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t. And the founders were smart enough to know we would always be plagued by religious fanatics in politics. So they gave us a first amendment, and a qualifier that there shall be no religious test to be president, or serve in public office. The wingnuts gloss over that little tid bit, of course. But most Americans, I think agree with the founders, but that won’t stop the ones that don’t in shoving there bibles and beliefs in our faces as better than that quaint constitution thingy, that was not written by the almighty, like the bible, or something.
Violet
So Texas can’t seem to get it’s redistricting thing settled and until it does, they can’t hold a primary. Right now it’s being pushed back from April 3rd to (tentatively) May 29th. However, there’s no guarantee they’ll settle it in time to have the primary on May 29th and it will have to be pushed back even later.
Texas has a lot of delegates. I can’t wait to see the fireworks if Romney and Santorum are still slugging it out at that time. Right now Santorum is way ahead in Texas, but things can change…
les
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
Fortunately, “thoughtful” and Santorum’s basic beliefs can’t really co-exist. How do you thoughtfully say that the majority of Americans and all the rest of the world are hell-bound minions of Satan?
Anoniminous
@Brachiator:
And the sound of flap-flap-flap echoes in the streets of DC as the pigs fly home to Capistrano.
The GOP Insiders and Corporate Faction will split the party if they force a candidate on the base through a Brokered Convention.
les
@schrodinger’s cat:
for the terrified 27%, no president (or regular American, for that matter) can be legitimate unless he’s One of Them.
cmorenc
The reason some fellow wingnuts are starting to note negatively critical things about Santorum’s expressed views is their realization that his positions make him too hard a sell to too much of the general electorate, and the increased prospect he might actually win the nomination has the bejeesus worried out of them that he might prove an anchor dragging the entire GOP ship to the bottom of the electoral sea come next November. But not because they are themselves offended by anything he’s said, beyond the contagious risk of losing he represents.
Nylund
It’s like trying to tell a bunch of Longhorns fans that UT is too good at football. If anything, the fact that the “lamestream” media is bashing it is only further proof that it’s not conservative enough.
But hey, good luck to the GOP establishment trying to control the monster they created. They’ll reap what they sowed, and what they sowed was a whole buncha crazy seeds.
OK…that’s enough mixed metaphors.
Chuck Butcher
No religious test
Allow me to laugh. Communism was very bad for this country.
Anoniminous
@Violet:
According to Rule 19 (a) all delegates to the GOP National Convention must be selected “35 days before the Convention.” So the last date for Texas to select is July 22, or 23rd if the Credential Committee is feeling generous.
Cowbelle
You guys are missing the difference between “mainline” (which is who Santorum condemned) Protestantism and “mainstream” (which is what conservative evangelicals are) Christianity.
“Mainline” refers to the older denominations in America which have both (a) lost influence and attendees over the decades, and (b) moved steadily to the left.
The minority of churches which these days are opposing wars, ordaining practicing gays, and generally acting like the good guys? Those are the “mainline” churches.
The big anti-gay “non-denominational” Protestant (but they don’t call themselves that often) mega-churches? Those are “mainstream” conservative evangelical churches, but they’re not “mainline.”
The vast majority of conservative evangelical Protestants (i.e., non-Catholics) do indeed consider the “mainline” Protestant churches to be increasingly outside of Christianity (as defined by the conservatives). They have natural allies among the conservative Catholics, and are willing to overlook the traditional P/C rivalries in order to fight against the liberal Christians.
So, no, there aren’t going to be any conservative evangelicals offended by Santorum’s blast against “mainline Protestant churches” — in fact, it’s going to make them rally around him more, because it’s showing that he’s ONE OF THEM since they feel the same way about those hated liberal churches.
Violet
@Anoniminous:
Or the redistricting won’t be settled by then and Texas voters won’t get to vote for a candidate in the primary. And there will be a gaping hole that needs to be filled by delegates in Texas somehow.
More popcorn please.
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
@Chuck Butcher: Yes, and no. The perceived existential threat from the Soviets made the country finally not just start teaching science, but treating it with respect, because without airplanes and rockets we thought we were fucked. Now that the Cold War is done, we think (left and right, unfortunately) that science is just one more opinion to be supported or denied, and not a final arbiter of reality.
We’re going to pay a price for that, one so high I’m not sure anyone here, myself included, can conceive of the ramifications.
Steve
The funny thing is that Jennifer Rubin is so deeply in the tank for Romney that she isn’t even swayed by the fact that Santorum is the absolute strongest candidate on Jennifer Rubin’s #1 issue, which is, of course, bombing Iran. Santorum has been ready to bomb Iran ever since he was a fetus (excuse me, I mean a pre-born Blastocyst-American, of course). It’s not easy being a hack.
MCA1
This is so much fun. Fellow travelers of Santorum don’t know anything about the editorial board or ownership of the Washington Post, and still think of it as a prime example of the librul media. So as others have pointed out, he’ll just turn the whole “those elitist snobs” thing on Jennifer Rubin. Who, conveniently for him, has a Jewish name in addition to being a columnist at (in their minds) a beltway liberal propoganda outlet. Santorum doesn’t do the put-upon “they hate me for my brilliant ideas” thing quite the way Newt does, but he’s got the day-to-day news cycle chops to know to take the offensive on this, and it’ll be good enough for the not-Mitts.
Linda Featheringill
@Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity:
Rubin:
I read her “reactionary” article. It’s actually a pretty good essay in which she tries to define what is conservative and what is flaming reactionary. And she is quite right. She also showed more guts than I thought she had.
But she’ll probably be stoned to death for telling the truth.
Shari
Silly me, I remember when Catholics weren’t considered Christian. Just ask the founding fathers how Catholics were treated
Brachiator
@Anoniminous:
I got no problem with that.
But I think that the GOP will not allow anything to spoil their show in the end, and will find a way to do some kind of unity dance.
Bruce S
Yeah but…
news.yahoo.com/romney-says-obama-fought-against-religion-222645762.html
nellcote
Isn’t the anti-christ supposed to be disguised as a man of god? Santorum would surely qualify.
PeakVT
@Steve: Santorum may want to do it more, but Romney is more likely to get the chance.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve been thinking Sanitorium was destined to fail, unless Willard stepped on his own tongue again. I think this may just do it. Willard has come out of the Keynsian closet:
Shari
@nellcote: I heard a fundamentalist Southern Baptist say this today
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Shari: about Santorum? Seems to me there a time when it was just a given among certain circles that the anti-Christ would be a Romish Papist, but I may be wishful remembering.
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What happens in Michigan, stays in Michigan. That’s an old saying the GOP uses during its primaries.
Steve
@PeakVT: I’m almost certain that is Rubin’s logic. She is not dumb.
Shari
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, about Santorum. I was raised Southern Baptist and was told that the anti-Christ would come with a knowledge of the Bible and was likely to be Papist.
wrb
@4tehlulz:
full of shit
wrb
@Cowbelle:
yup
Donut
Hey Doug, didn’t you get a little bit annoyed (to say the least) when Andtew Sullivan’s lackeys referred to you namelessly as some guy from Balloon Juice?
Donut
Hey Doug, didn’t you get a little bit annoyed (to say the least) when Andtew Sullivan’s lackeys referred to you namelessly as some guy from Balloon Juice? You should be a bit more, uh, courteous.
I think Kilgore is doing a great job, FWIW.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, if it wasn’t already clear that the “birth control” controversy was all about control, apparently some conservative Protestant colleges are arguing that they would be infringing on their students’ religious freedom by offering contraceptives in their insurance plan.
No, really. Apparently in loco parentis is alive and well.
WereBear (itouch)
They are sick. And instead of treating their sickness and getting well, they want to make the whole world sick so they feel normal.
wrb
@dmsilev:
Maybe his kids will chip in $100m from their trust.
Or he could throw in that much change himself. Maybe dig it out of the couch.
WereBear (itouch)
@Mnemosyne: Have they never heard of Andrea Yates?
She tried to live Santorum’s way. Did not work.
maya
@wrb: Exactly! The true conservative would use a butt plug or would have his anus stitched up just to keep all his shit in. “It’s my shit, I paid for the food that produced my shit, with money I put up with a lot of shit to earn, and by god I’m going to keep every last fecal drop of it. I shit you not.”
rikyrah
I think Rubin, et al need to shut the fuck up.
they got into bed with the rest of the sociopaths..ain’t a dime’s bit of difference between them and Little Ricky, except he’s more honest. who the hell does she think has been running the GOP?
so, she can go choke on it.
Bruce S
“she can go choke on it”
Yeah…if anybody’s crucifying her – as was noted in one of these comments – I’ll chip in with a bag of nails.
aarrgghh
who’s willing to bet $10,000 willard goes there?
Samara Morgan
because its fractal, right?
i fear you may have missed my comment, MasterTroll.
TooManyJens
testing, ignore