Little Ricky The Rooster Santorum Favors A Theocracy

Saturday at the National Governors Association get-down in Tampa, Maine's accidental teabagger governor, Paul LePage, pretty much said all his party's presidential nominees make him want to throw up.

Even as Republicans Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum compete for front-runner status with a win in Tuesday's Michigan primary, LePage said the entire field of GOP candidates is damaged goods because they have spent too much time bashing each other.

"I would love to see a good old-fashioned convention and a dark horse come out and do it in the fall," he said.

...LePage said the current GOP candidates broke Ronald Reagan's rule about not speaking ill of a fellow Republican and "have injured themselves and injured the party" with their attacks on each other.

"The candidates in this primary have beat themselves up so badly it would be nice to have a fresh face that we all could say, 'Okay.' The country deserves better than having people stand up and keep criticizing each other."

No one much cares what LePage, a clownish figure reviled even in his own state, has to say about national politics. But his always heavily pursued press coverage on this reminds us that we used to have presidential candidates like the one in the video above. When Little Ricky the Rooster Santorum and I were growing up on the East Coast it was far from uncommon for Catholic families to have framed pictures of President Kennedy in their homes. There may have even been one in the Santorum home-- but certainly not in the room of Little Rooster himself, who soon went on to be the president of the Penn State College Republicans. (Yes, yes, I know... he wants to trick elderly GOP voters into thinking he home-colleged himself, but the fact of the matter is, he spent a full decade in the same taxpayer-funded institutions of higher learning he now wants to defund.) Anyway, Little Rooster was on ABC-TV yesterday with George Stephanopoulos and he was happy to explain why President Kennedy upset him so much that a speech he made about a basic concept in the U.S. Constitution so upset him that he "almost threw up" [his words].

STEPHANOPOULOS: You have also spoken out about the issue of religion in politics, and early in the campaign, you talked about John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to the Baptist ministers in Houston back in 1960. Here is what you had to say.
 
(VIDEO CLIP)
 
SANTORUM: Earlier in my political career, I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up. You should read the speech.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That speech has been read, as you know, by millions of Americans. Its themes were echoed in part by Mitt Romney in the last campaign. Why did it make you throw up?
 
SANTORUM: Because the first line, first substantive line in the speech says, “I believe in America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country. 
 
This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion. That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square. Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, no, faith is not allowed in the public square. I will keep it separate. Go on and read the speech. I will have nothing to do with faith. I won’t consult with people of faith. It was an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent (ph) at the time of 1960. And I went down to Houston, Texas 50 years almost to the day, and gave a speech and talked about how important it is for everybody to feel welcome in the public square. People of faith, people of no faith, and be able to bring their ideas, to bring their passions into the public square and have it out. James Madison--
 
STEPHANOPOULOS: You think you wanted to throw up?
 
(CROSSTALK)
 
SANTORUM:  -- the perfect remedy. Well, yes, absolutely, to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up and it should make every American who is seen from the president, someone who is now trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can’t come to the public square and argue against it, but now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square.
 
STEPHANOPOULOS: We got a lot of questions on this on Facebook and Twitter, and I want to play one of them to you from Doc Seuss, Chris Doc Seuss. What should we do with all the non-Christians in this country? If I do not hold this belief, which I do not, how does he plan on representing me?
 
SANTORUM: Yes, I just said. I mean, that’s the whole point that upset me about Kennedy’s speech. Come into the public square. I want, you know, there are people I disagree with. Come to my town hall meetings, as people have done, and disagree with me and let’s have a discussion.  Let’s air your ideas, let’s bring them in, let’s explain why you believe what you believe and what you think is best for the country. People of faith, people of no faith, people of different faith, that’s what America is all about, it’s bringing that diversity into and challenge of the different ideas that motivate people in our country. That’s what makes America work. And what we’re seeing, what we saw in Kennedy’s speech is just the opposite, and that’s what was upsetting about it.

You can see why even a dim bulb like LePage realizes this kind of lunacy-- which can appeal to a fringe on the extreme right of the Republican base-- is absolutely toxic to mainstream American voters. If Santorum is the Republican nominee, Obama can rest easy. On top of that states like Maine the extreme right will lose it's hold on state legislatures. And the Democrats will probably win back the House and perhaps even hold the Senate. So I say... You go, Rooster! Make lots of speeches that demonstrate to the American people exactly why Pennsylvania voters threw you out of office by the largest margin of any senator of either party in 2006. GOP propagandist Alex Castellanos, no doubt with Rooster in mind, told Maureen Dowd for attribution in the NY Times that “Republicans being against sex is not good. Sex is popular.”

He said his party is “coming to grips with a weaker field than we’d all want” and going through the five stages of grief. “We’re at No. 4,” he said. (Depression.) “We’ve still got one to go.” (Acceptance.)

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates-- be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes-- and try to destroy them with it.

...How can the warm, nurturing Catholic Church of my youth now be represented in the public arena by uncharitable nasties like Gingrich and Rick Santorum?

“It makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,” Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates’ Cotton Mather attitude about women and gays. “It doesn’t understand the modern world that we live in.”

After a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Jeb Bush also recoiled: “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”

Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently called Santorum “rigid and homophobic.” Arlen Specter, who quit the Republicans to become a Democrat three years ago before Pennsylvania voters sent him home from the Senate, told MSNBC: “Where you have Senator Santorum’s views, so far to the right, with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America.” That from the man who accused Anita Hill of perjury.

Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.

Their jitters increased exponentially as they watched Mitt belly-flop in his hometown on Friday, giving a dreadful rehash of his economic ideas in a virtually empty Ford Field in Detroit, babbling again about the “right height” of Michigan trees and blurting out that Ann “drives a couple of Cadillacs.”

Romney’s Richie Rich slips underscore what Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist, told the Ripon Forum: “If we are only the party of Wall Street and country clubbers, we will quickly become irrelevant.”