I heard some of it last night flipping through the cable channels. Then this morning on Morning Joe it was all the rage. Apparently those weren’t flukes and the word has not-so-quietly gone out to any in the GOP still listening to reason: throw Santorum off the surging train. Up until now Santorum was seen as a mostly affable guy by the GOP elite — one who just happened to believe zygotes and corporations are people too, and women should stay home barefoot and pregnant with no access to birth control. But the prospect of a Santorum win in the primary, followed by the inevitable crushing defeat in November, now has worried:
(TPM) — As a result, many have started to hit the panic button, and they’re doing so in a way you probably wouldn’t have expected from the GOP, which still counts evangelicals among its strongest and most reliable base vote. Nevertheless, the freakout is evident from the Romney-allied Drudge Report homepage right through to radio host Laura Ingraham’s national airwaves. Rick Santorum, conservatives and his opponents started to say Tuesday, is just too dang extreme.
It’s always entertaining to watch people like Joe Scarborough or whoever ghosts writes for Matt Drudge these days suddenly discover — to their shock, shock I tell ya! — there are creepy extremist baby-cookin crazy nutcases walking freely among them. Generally, said baby cookers are the exact same people who have been on those very programs or appeared in those very news pubs with glowing praise from the respective pundits now clutching their pearls and calling for the smelling salts, so it’s hard to take the change of heart seriously.
But it is a great time to go to the lobby and get ourselves a snack!
On my news feed last night, Santorum was defending his 2008 Ave Maria speech claiming mainline Protestants were gone from xianity because of satan.
Bashing mainline Protestants who still have tens of millions of members and a lot of influence wasn’t too smart.
Even though I’m an ex-mainliner xian, I thought it was a bit insulting. The church of child rapers, misogyny, witch and heretic hunts, crusades, and Reformation wars hasn’t had the right to occupy the moral high ground for 2,000 years.
Predictably though, there wasn’t a word from any of the mainliners. They’ve been attacked all right. Not by satan but by the Sandman and seem to spend most of their time in a coma.
Fox has spent the last 25 years promoting the most idiotic, reactionary twaddle in order to produce a reliable voting block of mouth breathing idiots. Now, they’re shocked! Shocked I tell you! That the mouth breaters have found their ideal candidate and he’s just as wacked out as they are.
The conservative media created a monster and now they can’t control it to elect the corporate robot of their choice.
40-50 years ago, it was the mainline protestant churches (and to some extent the RCC as well) that were politically active — and they were liberal. They were at the forefront of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war movements. Of course, a lot of that was church leadership, who were pretty far to the left of most parishioners. Including me, back then. I’d like to think that the converse is true now, with evangelical leadership to the right of the broader membership, but it’s probably not the case.
The R’s have got themselves in quite a bind. The most viable candidate is a Mormon — not a Christian at all, according to many evangelicals. Two more are Roman Catholic, not real Christians according to many of the same folks. That leaves Ron Paul who’s a life member of the Church of Weird. Most evangelicals will probably hold their nose and vote for Romney when push comes to shove, rather than the Atheist-Muslim-Kenyan-Socialist-Nazi usurper, but some will not.
Aww… But Santorum vs Obama would have been hilarious! Oh well… *puts popcorn away*
I don’t get it. The GOP is basically throwing their two most popular* candidates under the bus. Who in the heck do they expect to actually run for president? Are they (and this would probably be the best possible plan given the state of the GOP right now) just going to throw in the towel, let Obama have 2012, and figure out their party’s position (beyond “We hate Obama”)?
* The best GOP candidate right now is roughly equivalent to being the best hockey player in all of Ecuador.
Andy Schlafley, of Conservapedia, is currently predicting Jeb Bush. I follow Conservapedia, for laughs, mostly on Rational Wiki, and the regulars there think this is hilarious. I’m not so sure!
Andy Schlafley, of Conservapedia, is currently predicting Jeb Bush.
So they’re going back to the “Group W” bench?
It’s really very simple: Romney is the only one of the bunch who has a decent shot at beating Obama. Perry appeared early on to have some viability, but did too poorly in the debates. (“Oops.”) Paul has some radical libertarian appeal, but he is too nutty to be a mainstream candidate. Gingrich can do well for short periods of time, but he has absolutely no self control and will inevitably shoot himself in the foot. Bachmann and Santorum are religious nutbags of such an astounding caliber that even your average voter can see it, and will be a huge turnoff to moderates. Cain has absolutely no grasp of foreign policy and several other presidential-y issues, and has shown no inclination to learn. Huntsman is too obscure (and is also a Mormon, to boot).
Which leaves Romney as their only realistic shot. He “looks” presidential enough, he’s squeaky clean, he does alright in debates, despite some recent facepalming tone-deafedness he doesn’t tend to self-sabotage (at least not to a Newtonian level), and none of his positions are so extreme that it will drive away moderates. In fact, if the economy wasn’t showing signs of life, and the GOP could have gotten their ducks in a row and made him the uncontested frontrunner several weeks ago, then Romney probably would be able to beat Obama.
But as d cwilson describes in comment #2, the Republican party has for too long been playing a dangerous game of pandering to shit-bag crazy extremists, and eventually the wingnuts managed to start to get their own elected to serious positions of power. Now they are fucked. They either have to give up on attracting the sort of voter who goes for Santorum, or else they have to give in and run a fucking crazy nutcase like Santorum. Both solutions are very bad for the GOP.
Oh, I’m so happy! :D
The solution is simple, and I’ve said it before: The only way out for them is to either get sane… or end any pretense of democracy.