RICK SANTORUM EXPLAINS IT ALL: “WE WILL NEVER HAVE THE MEDIA ON OUR SIDE, EVER, IN THIS COUNTRY. WE WILL NEVER HAVE THE ELITE SMART PEOPLE ON OUR SIDE, BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THEY HAVE THEY SHOULD HAVE THE POWER TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO.”

Rick Santorum speaking yesterday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., gave a curious insight into just who the powerbrokers on the Religious Right want their base to be. If taken directly in context, which is something the Right rarely does in regard to the sitting President of the United States, Mr. Santorum speaking to a largely white and boisterous crowd at the Omni Shoreham Hotel said this:

I don’t even know what kind of revolution we’re in right now. We seem to be creating dynamism in the marketplace like it’s never been seen. Why? Freedom. Freedom, not government dictates, not planners who are going to invest in solar energy companies and tell us what our future is going to be by some bureaucrat making those decisions. No. No, we’re going to trust you.

That’s why the media doesn’t go along with us. You have to understand that. They don’t like conservatism. They like the other side, not necessarily, I would argue, because they necessarily agree with them. It’s because they can influence the country more. You see, if just a few people make decisions about what this world looks like and what this country looks like, well, then you can have people sitting in offices in the major media outlets and in Hollywood who can – they can deal with a small group of people and influencing them, getting them to jump through the hoops they want to. It’s much harder if all of you collectively build America. It’s much harder to influence you.

We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do. So our colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side. The conservative movement will always be – and that’s why we founded Patriot Voices – the basic premise of America and American values will always be sustained through two institutions, the church and the family. (Applause.)

And so economic conservatism – libertarian types can say, oh, well, we don’t want to talk about the social issues. Without the church and the family, there is no conservative movement. There is no basic values in America in force, and there is no future for our country. (Applause.)

So it is our job in this election, it is our job, to go out and make a difference. It is our job to go out and talk to fellow believers. And I don’t mean Christians. I mean fellow believers in the American creed, fellow believers in those basic principles that built our country.

Go out and preach to them the American ethic. Preach to them what made us great. And remind them that that greatness does not lie in Washington, D.C. or in the hands of a president. It lies in each and every one of us and in our families.

I’m excited, because I think we have a nominee who understands that. I read – I didn’t see it, but I read the transcript of what Governor Romney said here. I could have given that speech. I feel good. I feel good. (Laughter, applause.) We have to do our part.

So I encourage each and every one of you to leave here energized. It is our watch. At the end of the Declaration of Independence, we all know those words. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are – excuse me. We know these words, that we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortune and our sacred honor.”

What we have here from Mr. Santorum is telling on many levels. Clearly, there is an us against them sort of dynamic going on but these sorts of rifts are created by the Left as well just not to so much of an extreme. Marshall McLuhan famously said in 1946 that “the medium is the message” and that is as true today in American politics as it ever was. Santorum makes the point, however, that anti-intellectualism and satisfaction with being economically middling should be coupled with a drone-like adherence to religious and social beliefs. That makes no sense when you cosider that Mitt Romney is an Ivy League educated man worth more than $250 million whose family will have inherited wealth for many more generations into the future. So here the dynamic is clear as well. Santorum uses his Theocratic beliefs which are similarly held by middle class conservative white voters throughout the rural North, the South and the Midwest, to build a bridge in the air between the class animux that should exist between an elite intellectual businessman who has desires to be the highest elected official in America and the hoi polloi of the Right.

The only problem is that the Religious Right have seen this movie before. They saw this with the election of George W Bush in 2000. In that election the race became a watershed both for businesses and for individuals that was about what the future direction of America would be; a path toward neconservatism, a curious amalgamation of social values and military might a global cop, or neoprogressivism where the environment and social safety net issues would finally get the treatment in the public sphere they deserve by way of making hard choices now to assure a better future for for the generations of Americans to come.

America did not, I feel, fail itself by electing George W Bush. That lesson needed to be learned by Conservatives and Liberals alike. That path took America to trillions of dollars wasted in Iraq for a victory that was not won because of a lies told to heat the blood of the same Americans that Santorum spoke to at the Values Voter Summit. In this race Mitt Romney, a man who inspires no one is not seeking to inspire anyone. He, like George W Bush, is willing to offer lip service to the far Right and the Religious Right to get their votes on 6 November 2012. Romney is not a “true believer” like Catholic Rick Santorum is. Romney needs “true believer” surrogates like Santorum to get out there and energize the base.

The Conservatives now are being told, by one of their pious masters, that they are mediocre and stupid to paraphrase Mr. Santorum. I will admit here that the GOP is depending on those with negative attitudes toward President Barack Obama to constitute the majority of their voter base. The average TEA Party voter in 2012 can quote chapter and verse the lies about welfare to work requirements, their theories about corruption of the Supreme Court in the Affordable Care Act decision and most recently their refusal to believe that Muslim take their religion so seriously that a film trailer could inspire violence on a regional scale and thereby conflating the tragedy of four dead diplomtic service workers including Ambassador J Christopher Stevens into the failure of the Carter administration in 1979.

To the delusional voters on the Right this morning the sitting president is the “other.” This belief changing before 6 November 2012 is as unlikely as MSNBC becoming a digital parrot of the Koch Brothers’ goals for America. Yet Barack Obama is the sitting President of the United States. Getting there was the easy part; keeping Obama in office is what will be difficult. I, personally, still believe that the President will be re-elected. The violence in the Middle East will be a campaign footnote before the first debate is held on 3 October 2012 in Denver, Colorado; the teacher’s strike in Chicago will likely end next week.

By this time next week, the American electorate will be talking about the striking differences between the Right and the Left. Their choices are defined clearly by what has been said about women’s health on both sides. Their choices have defined by the Right wishing to exert controls on a society that no longer looks as it did in the post World War 2 era. Santorum and the “true believers” want to go back to those days when women could not choose to have or not to have a child, to have birth control options. The Religious Right want to go back to a time when the electorate was dominated by middle class white men who feared religion and who had wives who voted as they were told by their husbands and fathers. Conservatives who are being duped yet again by Mitt Romney want the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people of America to go back in the closet at best or be rounded up by the Sheriff Joe Arpaio types doing the same work of Bull Conner in the 1960s. This election is about being a Human Being who has a choice in charting one’s own path in freedom, vice being a cog in a religion actuated corporate profit driven machine where your only choice is to pray to someone else’s deity that the law will not find fault in your personal decision and come for you.

Qu’ul cuda praedex nihil!

Sarah Bloch, D.S.V.J., J.F., O.Q.H [Jur.]
Amici Bax Demvolu Comnu
Politics & Culture Wars Managing Editor
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