Weird Rick?

Mark Steyn has a great column (aren’t they all?) about Santorum and his beliefs.

Let's take it as read that Rick Santorum is weird. After all, he believes in the sanctity of life, the primacy of the family, the traditional socio-religious understanding of a transcendent purpose to human existence. Once upon a time, back in the mists of, ooh, the mid–20th century, all these things were, if not entirely universal, sufficiently mainstream as to be barely worthy of discussion. Now they're not. Isn't the fact that conventional morality is now "weird" itself deeply weird? The instant weirdification of ideas taken for granted for millennia is surely mega-weird — unless you think that our generation is possessed of wisdom unique to human history. In which case, why are we broke?

Look, I get the problem with a Santorum candidacy. And I get why he seems weird to Swedes and Aussies, and even Americans. If you're surfing a news bulletin en route from Glee to Modern Family, Santorum must seem off-the-charts weird, like a monochrome episode that's been implausibly colorized from a show too old even for TV Land reruns. It would be healthier to thrash these questions out in the culture, in the movies and novels and pop songs. But Hollywood has taken sides, and the Right has mostly retreated from the field. And somebody has to talk about these things somewhere or other. Our fiscal crisis is not some unfortunate bookkeeping accident that a bit of recalibration by a savvy technocrat can fix. In the United States as in Greece, it is a reflection of the character of a people. The problem isn't that Rick Santorum's weird, but that a government of record-breaking brokeness already busting through its newest debt-ceiling increase even as it announces bazillions in new spending is entirely normal.

Read the whole thing.

Why is there a rancorous Republican primary?

Michael Gerson wrote that Republicans are making it easy for Obama

It is increasingly difficult to argue that the GOP is benefiting from the struggle between Mitt Romney and the challenger — alternately outsider and insider, hefty and svelte, conservative and more conservative — who isn’t Romney. Internal Republican ideological debates, while interesting to Republican ideologists, have little relationship to electoral needs. The longer these controversies continue, the longer President Obama has to regain his political balance.

So why is this struggle going on? The reason is fairly simple. There is an ideological struggle going on within the Republican Party.

The Democrats settled their years ago. The Democrats have become the Party of the Left, the party of Hollywood, San Francisco, and billionaires who tell us that they want to pay more taxes to keep the pitchfork wielding mobs at bay. The so-called “moderates” – if they exist at all – live on in a totally powerless rump that is only part of the Democrat Party out of tradition.

The Democrats are the party of Barack Obama, the party of Chicago politics, the party of Jeremiah Wright, the “God dammed America” party, the Pelosi and Reed party, the America is always wrong party, the "why are we not more like Europe" party,  the Christians are dangerous nuts party, the party that believes America was conceived in sin and ravages the planet. That may not be how they campaign on the national level. Barack Obama ran as a supporter of traditional marriage: one man to one woman. But no one really believes that or that he will defend that position. He ran as a budget balancer, blaming Bush for his deficits, and has run up deficits that were literally unimaginable during the 2008 election. Glenn Beck predicted it and he has now been banished to the wilderness for daring to say it and be right. Obama is the wink and nudge president, saying the things that keep the moderates in line but his fellow Leftists know that he is lying through his teeth. They understand.

The Republicans are moving in the direction of the old Conservatives, the party of Bill Buckley in his prime and the newly energized Tea Party. But the old line Republican “establishment” that once dominated the party is not yet the toothless, powerless rump that the Democrats made their “moderates.” The Republican Establishment still dominates the big money game, giving them an edge in buying the advertising and staffing that often wins elections. They have pedigrees going back at least one generation. They have mega-millions in the bank. They have rolodexes with the private phone numbers of the old line industrialists who still give big bucks to the Republican Party. George Romney is a perfect example: son of a former governor of Michigan, wealthy, impeccably groomed and now given to wearing open necked shirts and blue jeans to appeal to the middle class. He can command the millions to roll in, but …. he cannot command the enthusiasm of the people who vote. His hope of winning both the nomination and the election is the fear of a second Obama term. There are very few votes for George Romney, many against Obama.

Conservatives like Santorum gain points from the Republican Right for being the next not-Romney. But as interest in Santorum grows, some of his beliefs that the MSM demonizes are already converting some of the Right. Genuine belief in God may seem bizarre to the media mavens, as is belief in the Devil. If they attend religious services at all, they are accustomed to homilies that fit neatly into their environmentalist and Health-Education-Welfare catechism. In case you have not been paying attention, their pews are emptying, just as they are all but abandoned in Europe. Who needs a church as a social program with a clerical collar? But tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans are actually religious with traditional belief in God. Instead of being a Santorum weakness, it is one of his strengths. Outside of traditional Christianity, Santorum can voice the issues and concerns that animate Middle America, striking a true note rather than lip-synching it as Romney does too often. And because he believes what he says, he does not make the fatal mistake of backing away when challenged. Nothing kills a candidate faster than apologizing for his past.

It remains to be seen if the Conservative faction of the Republican tent comes out victorious this time, dragging the old Establishment along because of its fear of Obama. In the Republican Party the direction is obvious. The ideological Right is going to dominate. The only question is when.

Andrea Mitchell with an aspirin between her knees

Foster Fries told an old joke about contraception in the old days, saying: “On this contraceptive thing, my Gosh it’s such [sic] inexpensive,” he added. “You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

I have heard that joke for years. But suddenly the media mavens that revel in the freedom that gives us pornography on grocery store shelves and the number one topic on the Internet; the same press that demands the free distribution of birth control pills, demonizes people that oppose homosexual marriage and those who oppose killing unborn children, has the vapors about this joke. Andrea Mitchell needs to catch her breath after being told an old joke; what is he, a nun? Even nuns have heard this one without blushing.

Has anyone watched TV or gone to a movie the last few decades? The entertainment media would not exist without sex jokes, sex acts between both animate and inanimate objects, and gratuitous nudity, and Andrea Mitchell has to catch her breath about a little joke that mentions women’s knees and an aspirin tablet?

I have heard about faking it, but the Left media is jumping the shark with this one.

Who's "Weird," The Santorums or the Abortionists?

It seems that Santorum is not alone.  Even Lefty Charles Lane of the Washington Post is there to defend him from the haters and Race pimps for whom the Culture of Death is a sacrament. 

I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time. When I told him what had happened, his first question was, “Well, where is the baby?” I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory -- too abstract. In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.

The Dead Baby Pile On: Jezebel Says Karen Santorum Had An Abortion

Breitbart's Big Journalism describes

Jezebel, the site where self-obsessed women celebrate unprotected promiscuity, is smearing another woman’s loss of child for politics.