Dark Bilious Vapors

For some reason, Rick Santorum's been my bear of the blogs today. (I've earlier mentioned my concept of "the bear"; I stole it from a Lewis Black schtick.)

Anyway, a few interesting things about Santorum came to my attention:

• A most excellent letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

  As a teacher for the Diocese of Pittsburgh for 14 years, one important lesson I learned was that no matter what I said to the child, whatever the parents said superseded my message. What parents say and how they live sends a message stronger than any teacher's voice no matter what the issue.
  
  Sen. Rick Santorum and his wife have taught their children a powerful lesson on civic responsibility by refusing to pay any tuition money to the Penn Hills School District for their children who attended the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School ("Penn Hills Loses Bid to Charge Santorum," July 12). Released from that payment on a technicality shows that even an upstanding, moral gentleman like Sen. Santorum teaches his children the following lessons:
  
  1) Take advantage of the system whenever you can.
  
  2) The little guy pays while the rich and powerful guy gets away with it.
  
  3) As a Catholic, you have no obligation to pay your share to the common good in spite of Catholic social doctrine.
  
  Finally, I am shocked that our religious leaders who see Sen. Santorum as some sort of faith-and-morals hero have not spoken up on this issue at all.
  
  SISTER LIGUORI ROSSNER
  Sisters for Christian Community
  Bloomfield

• Thomas Oliphant, in the Boston Globe, rightly tears the disHonorable Senator a new Santorum for his stupid comments about the liberal climate in Boston being responsible for the pedophile priests in that Archdiocese:

  It is not even accurate to assert that Boston was the center of the child abuse horror. A demagogue feasting off headlines could be forgiven three years ago for equating headlines with deeper truth, but the fact is, as Kennedy put it, that this horrific scandal knew no state or ideological boundaries. Using a simple, clarifying concept -- priests accused as a percent of priests in the affected diocese -- the ''center" turns out to have been Covington, Ky. -- known to business travelers everywhere as the home of Cincinnati's airport. The percentage of accused priests there from 1950 on was 9.6 percent, compared to 7 percent in Boston.
  
  Perhaps Santorum could examine the wild, permissive sexual climates in such dens of iniquity as Albany, Jackson, Miss., and Belleville, Ill., all of which had greater concentrations of accused priests than Boston did.

  Of course, the real point wasn't that Boston has proportionally more pedophile priests, it just had a slimy, disgusting, utterly worthless archbishop, Bernard Cardinal Law, who bent over backwards to protect his pedophile priests--and who earned a promotion for it (and the fact that the utterly reprehensible Cardinal Law wasn't taken out and shot after he was recalled to the Vatican speaks volumes about what a fraud the Catholic Church is when it pretends to lecture the rest of us on our lousy morals).
• The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has just released a wonderful ad just in time for Santorum's re-election campaign
• Crooks and Liars tells us that General J.C. Christian, patriot, is the brains behind the perfect contraceptive for Santorum's own re-election bid:

  Call a press conference today and declare that you stand with Sen. Santorum and his efforts to end legal contraception. Contact your membership and ask them to write letters to the editors and to call talk radio shows demanding an end to birth control. We can win this battle with your help....

  The General is most certainly a national treasure.

Len on 07.27.05 @ 01:24 PM CST