Rick Santorum - The Christianist Candidate of Choice

Both polls and the chattering class on television news shows are noting a huge upsurge in Rick Santorum's ranking against Mitt Romney even as thrice married serial adulterer Newt Gingrich seems to be providentially spiraling downward to a hopefully hard landing. But is the lunatic Republican base simply gravitating toward Santorum simply because they have nowhere else to go - especially if the Christofascists refuse to vote for a Mormon? Frankly, a match up between Santorum and Obama in November could be the Christofascists' Waterloo and a gift to Obama. Absent some transformation that I don't see Santorum being capable of making, the man is too much of a religious extremist to do well in November. He even makes the delusional Chimperator George W. Bush look rational and like a relative moderate. Andrew Sullivan summarizes some of the analysis in these highlights:

Jesse Singal wonders how effective Romney's inevitable attacks on Santorum will be:

[A] lot of the old Santorum stuff about to get churned up, the most infamous of it his comparison of homosexuality to bestiality, is unlikely to bother conservative voters all that much. His views on social issues could make him a semi-poisonous general-election candidate, but in a primary — particularly a primary currently starring Romney? Less so.

Pete Spiliakos, who likes Santorum quite a bit, worries about his chances in the general election:

Take the whole women in combat thing. His point about group dynamics isn’t crazy, but he is just off. He just isn’t quick enough or disciplined enough to deflect these kinds of questions or make his point in an unalienating way. I don’t think the women in combat thing hurts him, but it is a warning. If Santorum is somehow the Republican nominee, he is going to get suckered into these kinds of culture war fights every couple of weeks. And this is Santorum being good. He isn’t that bright, he isn’t that articulate, and he can’t be fixed.

He is easily the politician most hostile to individual liberty on the right. He believes states have every right to ban contraception, all abortion, and any legal protections for gay couples. He disavows any secular, Enlightenent view of America's founding. For him, freedom only counts if you adhere to the current fundamentalist rigidity of the Benedict XVI church. I've cited this before, but here he is on freedom:

This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. . . . .

[H]e explicitly cites the bedroom as the place where big government can intervene. If you are not reproducing as the Vatican demands, legal penalties are in principle possible. There is no public-private distinction. His mentor, Robbie George, takes the view that in principle, the state also has the right to penalize masturbation with criminal penalties, a position flushed out of him in the Prop 2 trial in Colorado. The only reason the two would not actively prosecute gay couples for having sex or straight couples for using condoms is for prudential reasons: it's not practical. But in theory, they'd have the Catholic church's most reactionary elements dictating your freedoms.

If you believe in individual freedom, this country has no greater opponent than Rick Santorum. And for three years, the GOP has tried to tell us that the Tea Party was about extending freedom and ending debt rather than extending the power of Christianist Big Government. We know better now.

Santorum is a menace plain and simple. And if the GOP were delusional enough to make him the nominee, I suspect Obama could easily expose his extremism and his Christofascist desire to dictate the beliefs and morality that must be imposed on all citizens.