Liberals Are Cool

Who Is Rick Santorum And Why You Need To Know

A refresher from Matt Taibbi from 2006 just after Santorum lost his Senate seat:

“A fiercely devout Catholic with an altar-boy face, Santorum has been an icon of America’s political divisiveness for the past dozen years — a pioneer of the religious, crusading politics that helped wipe out the ideological middle and divide the country into two seething, paranoid camps fueled by implacable hatreds.

By religious, I don’t mean the injection of biblical themes into his campaigns, though that was also a feature of his style. No, the hallmark of Santorum politics was to say something utterly outrageous and insulting about his opponents, incur a national outcry and then refuse to take even a half a step back, digging in with his convictions in the manner of a man of faith. He blamed pedophilia in the Boston Archdiocese on Massachusetts liberalism. He compared Democrats engaged in a filibuster to Nazis. He likened homosexuality to “man on dog” sex. He described the charity group Care as being “pro-prostitution” and “anti-American.” And in his reelection campaign this fall, he accused his opponent, state treasurer Bob Casey, of making state-pension investments that support “terrorism and genocide.”

Thus, to the Santorum point of view, opponents were at various times whores, dog-fuckers, terrorists, Nazis, mass killers, boy-touchers and traitors. Even McCarthy never got that creative.”