Poor Sen. Rick Santorum! While it's often true that religious loons of a feather flock together, are there enough of them in PA to save his behind?

It hadn't occurred to me that Sen. Rick Santorum [left] would be trying to get out the Orthodox Jewish vote, as Howie points out below, but it certainly makes sense. Senator Rick's people and the ultra-Orthodox are natural allies, as long as they can both keep their singular genius for hatred pointed in directions other than at each other.

I guess many non-Jews don't understand why those of us of the "chosen" find the idea of an International Jewish Conspiracy so hilarious. Anyone who understands how factionalized world Jews are knows that by an hour into the firsr organizational meeting of the IJC, the whole thing would have dissolved into half a dozen competing shouting matches, with fistfights already breaking out. By the end of the meeting, you would half at least three splinter groups breaking off, each claiming to be the only authentic Jewish Conspiracy.

(If you could even start the meeting. Assuming the event is catered--and do you think you're going to get all those Jews to travel around the world for a function that's not catered?--there are bound to be factions boycotting because they don't accept the kosher certificates secured for the food by the caterer, their rabbis being much holier than those other thieving scoundrels masquerading as kashrut authorities. After all, we wouldn't want "impure" food, not to mention money going into the hands of the wrong rabbis.)

I don't know of anyone who has more contempt for the extremist tinge of modern American ultra-Orthodoxy than more reasonable Jews. You would think that a man as vile as the late Rabbi Meir Kahane [right] would serve as a cautionary tale for where that kind of bigotry and ignorance leads. Instead, the creep became a hero and role model. (The extremist American Orthodox rabbis have still never been properly held to account for their role in fomenting the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.)

Howie and I have often remarked--and it's hardly an original observation--that fundamentalists of all religious dominations have so much in common that they're virtually interchangeable. Which is what makes it so comical that so many of them wind up killing each other. (At any rate, it would be comical if they were killing only each other.) In a way, it's kind of sweet that the loonytunists of American Jewry and Christianity have found each other.

It certainly shows, though, that those wacko Jews have no sense about who they associate with, managing to ally themselves with some of the country's historically proudest and most robust Jew-haters. Why else would they call themselves "Anti-Semites for Israel"?

Oh, they don't actually call themselves that? Okay, it's probably me who calls them that. Still, if the shoe fits, wear it.

(Or at any rate you can wear it as soon as you show us where the leather for that shoe came from, and we can run it past the appropriate rabbinical authorites to make sure it's okay to wear. Naturally--pun somewhat Talmudically intended--if there are materials other than leather involved, well, that could be a whole other story, or stories. We'll get back to you.)