From xoverboard.com, August Pollak
There was a segment on The Daily Show last night joking about how Rick Santorum seems like the perfect fit for the Tea Party and still fails to go anywhere in the polls. This is actually a question that I've heard elsewhere: why isn't Santorum the frontrunner at this point? He has no family values or "morals" scandals; in fact his entire image is his family and insane, no-compromises opposition to abortion or most forms of women's rights. He's unabashedly conservative and supports almost every single thing the Tea Party does.
So why isn't Rick Santorum a Tea Party darling? It's not because he lost his last election. It's not even because of the long-past-uninteresting Google bombing of his name (something that, by the way, would disappear in about a week if he actually became the Republican nominee and every news site in the world started mentioning him frequently). I hate that I have to keep pointing this out but the only reason Santorum isn't leading the polls is becasue he's not an asshole.
Now don't get me wrong, everything he stands for and most of what he proposes in the campaign is shitty and horrible, but that's not the same thing as being an asshole. Santorum isn't on TV telling the 99% to "go take a bath and get a job" or wondering if we can torture people, say, a second time because LOL torture. He doesn't do things that make Eric Erickson write posts about how "he's sure to piss off liberals" which is pretty much why everyone pretended Sarah Palin was going to be president for two years.
This is, of course, why Newt Gingrich is leading in polls right now. There are blog posts about how "he'll embarass Obama in the debates" which is right-wing lunatic speak for "he's an enormous asshole and will act like one on television." That's why they're abandoning Cain, because he's an adulterer, for Gingrich, who was an adulterer twice. They don't care. They just enjoy how much of an asshole Gingrich is. You know how last week, Mitt Romney put out an ad that lied about Obama saying something, and when called on it his campaign responded "well we don't care?" Yeah, that was a dogwhistle for "we are being assholes" and they were hoping that the Tea Party liked it.
It's not like I enjoy saying all this, people. This is just the awful truth of where we are as a nation. Hundreds of Republicans are going to gather in Iowa in about 30 days or so and decide who is the biggest enough asshole to make liberals feel bad the most. And that person will then have a 50% chance of having complete control of America's nuclear arsenal.
Posted by August J. Pollak at 8:53 AM
