RICK SANTORUM EXPLAINS WHY THE FAR RIGHT LOVES SUSAN COLLINS AND DETESTS MCCAIN

Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock could have done a more dramatic version. But Mike Lux... he sure had me on the edge of my seat. I'm not going to capture Mike's great sense of timing and thrilling prose in this report so I urge you to read the original at Open Left. The short version is that Mike was returning on Amtrak from NYC and couldn't help overhearing Republican jihadi-- and recently defeated senator-- Rick Santorum working his cell phone to bludgeon the very concept of Mac is Back.

...we've gotta find a way to beat McCain, just would be just awful, and going on and on about how much McCain sucks and that even having Hillary or Obama would be better than having McCain because he would just be horrible for the conservative movement because he just doesn't get the movement and he's always using liberal language to talk about things and how that's a terrible thing. And in one conversation with one person he was talking to, he was trying to talk him into coming out with a terrible story about McCain from five or six years ago, and he's like yeah, what he did to you was just incredible, and you should go public with that story, etc.

This isn't really big news; anyone following the ins and outs of the Republican nomination race knows they all hate each other and the radical right of which Santorum is a leader-- especially loathes McCain with a passion. Last week Mother Jones took a stab at explaining the phenomenon by going to one of Santorum's partners in crime, Tom DeLay as well as to the craziest and most extremist blogger from GOP-universe.

What I did find interesting in Mike's account, however, was in the next paragraph (bold is my own contribution):

So pretty much the whole trip this guy is working his cell phone, talking to people about how anyone is better than McCain and Giuliani would be better than McCain because then at least he wouldn't betray the conservative movement… yeah, Giuliani is bad on some issues like abortion, but at least he would stand with the conservative movement. He was saying that there are people like Susan Collins who vote moderate sometimes, but at least she is a team player who always plays with the team and never plays against the conservative side even if she has to give the liberals a vote because she's from Maine.

I wish Mike would have reminded Santorum, when he introduced himself, that Collins is part of the Lieberman-McCain axis and that she's very much supporting McCain-- just the way she's always supported Bush. And if Mike had his laptop with him, maybe he could have gotten ole Dog-on-Man to take a look at this 35 second video clip of Susie: