“I was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for Congress.” —
Rick Santorum, in a 1995 interview.
“Santorum is a product of the polarization of our politics. He has taken advantage of it. He understands it. And he will take a position to benefit himself to get a small group of people to love him adamantly. His personality hasn’t evolved, his politics has.” - Pat Ewing, the former campaign manager for Senator Harris Wofford, whom Santorum defeated in the 1994
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“It’s not just that the most irresponsible candidates can play to the base and get a boost in the polls, while more sober-minded candidates like Jon Huntsman fail to get attention.
The real damage is to the process of running for president itself. Because when low blows get rewarded, the incentive to try to emulate Lincoln — holding yourself to a higher standard — is diminished.
And one barometer of this atmospheric shift is in the increasingly overheated rhetoric by candidates attacking the current president. This serial disrespect ends up unintentionally diminishing the office of president itself.” - John Avalon, CNN
Mitt Romney: “President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.” “Sometimes I think we have a president who doesn’t understand America.” This line was straight out of the “Alien in the White House” playbook.
Rick Santorum: Obama is “an avowed Muslim” who “constantly says that our Constitution is passé” and “has no legal right to be calling himself president.”
Newt Gingrich: “Kenyan anti-Colonial mindset.” “Obama’s secular socialist machine.”
This is the kind of rhetoric we now hear routinely from presidential candidates. Pathetic.
“While Republicans promote themselves as the friendliest party for Wall Street, stock investors do better when Democrats occupy the White House,” Bloomberg reports.
In fact, since John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, $1,000 invested in a hypothetical fund that tracks the S&P 500 “only when Democrats are in the White House would have been worth $10,920 at the close of trading yesterday. That’s more than nine times the dollar return an investor would have realized from following a similar strategy during Republican administrations.”
NINE TIMES BETTER WITH DEMOCRATS!
Bill Clinton was the Democrat with the biggest S&P 500 gain, and George W. Bush was the Republican with the worst market record.
Convenient how Republicans would forget their most recent president was the WORST.
(Source: politicalwire.com)
Dana Milbank calls out that horrid little man for equating President Obama with Adolf Hitler:
“This is where Santorum exists, in a place of binary extremes of good and evil, where his political foe isn’t just wrong but adheres to a ‘phony theology’ not found in the Bible. His frequent tendency to go from zero to Nazi over ordinary political disagreements … shows why he’s outside the bounds major political parties have applied to their past presidential nominees. Some of Santorum’s opponents have suggested that his Hitler tic reflects his own autocratic tendencies.”
Rick likes to dehumanize his opponents. President Obama can not be a diplomatic, pragmatic leader of a democracy for Rick’s goose-stepping rhetoric to work. Obama must be re-created in Rick’s irrational simple mind as the ultimate evil in the world, and an evil that only he can stop.
“It’s not a new candidate the Right needs. It’s a new electorate.” —
Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast.
The party’s biggest problem is the ideological bloodlust of its base. No savior candidate for the GOP in 2012. The Republicans have gone completely off the deep end.
“It’s a party made up of on the one hand unprincipled cowards, and on the other of people devoted to principles so extreme that they’d have serious trouble attracting more than about 42 percent of the vote.”
“If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy. So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.”
Mitt broke the First Rule of Republican Fight Club: Never talk about reality.
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves.” - Marcel Proust
“Why is today’s religious right and their political enablers and supporters like Santorum and Gingrich even more benighted, more backward than ignorant, uneducated pissants who lived nearly a thousand years ago? Why do today’s religiously (un)informed right-wingers scream bloody murder at the very mention of climate change, stem cell research, natural selection, and a myriad other scientific topics when many of these same fields of study were avidly pursued by prominent members of the Church centuries ago with an eye toward increasing, rather than diminishing, humanity’s knowledge and understanding of the natural world?
The best guess is power and control. Empowering ignorance is a useful way to to stave off the sovereignty of truth. Holding up science as a straw-man/boogieman enables the right to distract the masses from the real problems facing them, problems often directly caused by right-wing policies. The religion vs. science screamfest is a handy smokescreen for the right as they attempt to divert scrutiny away from their actual plan of taking control of the country away from anyone who is not of their tribe and handing it to the wealthy, the oligarchs, and those whose motives are firmly grounded in their book of rules, the right-wing quarto of money, power, war, and control.”
We are witnessing a new low in the right’s never-ending search for more and more insidious ways to grab onto power.
(Source: realitychex.com)
“[Rick] Santorum … admitted to [Bob] Schieffer [of CBS News] that he believes humans are biblically commanded to take dominion over the earth, and that environmentalism is in conflict with that mandate…. In Michigan today, Santorum is rehashing this speech claiming that ‘climate science’ is actually ‘political science.’ Translation: there is no science, there is only God. Any attempt at science is necessarily political, and therefore illegitimate if in conflict with a ‘Christian worldview.’” - Sara Posner
Science is political? Only a snake oil salesman like Santorum could be this pathetic.
The more attention on Rick’s theocracy means more votes for Obama.