Rick Santorum Protects the Freedom of Con-Men

By Charles P. Pierce

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/rick-santorum-freedom-6633251

Rick Santorum, papist nutter and GOP It Boy of the moment, is well and truly energized by his recently demonstrated ability to get 25,000-odd Iowans to show up and write his name on a piece of paper. The way you know this is because his stump answers are no longer stumps. They are fully blossomed trees, ripe with pious arrogance, vicious social policies camouflaged with luxurious rhetorical foliage within which the bullshit birds sing their sweet songs of "dependency" and "freedom," and low-hanging hypocrisy just so ever-ripe for the picking. No kidding. The crazy is in full flower in this one.

Begin simply with the place last night's even took place. It was an assisted-care facility/nursing home run by Rockingham County here in the southern part of New Hampshire. It has disabled residents on Medicaid and it has 200 people in its nursing-home section, almost all of whom are on Medicare. It is a government-run facility, and a very well-regarded one, which is impossible because, as we all know, the government has no business interfering with the health-care "market." The facts about this facility will become important later on. Stay with us.

You can also tell he's energized because he's back to being the legendary dick he's always been reputed to be by those who knew him best in Washington. A kid from Haverhill, Mass., got up to ask a question, and Santorum hung him out to dry for the benefit of his assembled fans from New Hampshire. While discussing President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which the president made because the congressional Republicans refused to give his nominees a hearing, because the congressional Republicans don't want the NLRB — a fully legitimate agency of the federal government — to work, the grandson of a coal miner sneered, "I'm suurrrre they'll be soooo friendly and hospitable to American business." His entire pitch now is an extended nyah-nyah in the general direction of whatever White House exists at the moment in his imagination.

"You can't be trusted with freedom."
"He believes you are incapable of freedom."

"The president believes you need him. He'll solve all your problems. Remember all those people at the rallies in 2008? People would say, 'Oh, Mr. President, I know you'll help me with this.' He convinced Americans that they needed to believe in a president. You want a president who believes in you."
(I use italics because there is no "Seventh Grade Sarcasm" function on this computer. Sorry.)

You can also tell he's energized because he's not at all shy about taking his more outre views out for a walk. Take Iran, for a moment. Did you know that the Iranians are building their nuclear weapons in Qom? (Santorum couches a lot of his answers this way, in the manner of a middle-school civics teacher who's read Time twice this month.) Do you know why? Well, he's going to tell you. Qom is a holy city to the Shi'a population of Iran. (The return of the 12th Imam is mixed up in this somewhere, too. Listening to Santorum on Iran is like accidentally tuning in one of those ancient astronaut documentaries on the History Channel.) "It is a very important town dealing with the end times for Shi'a Islam," he says.

In other words, Rick Santorum believes that the current Iranian regime is building a nuclear weapon not merely as leverage for power in that region and the world, and not merely to defend itself, and not merely, as he himself says, "to protect itself from retaliation while it engages in acts of terrorism." He believes it is building a bomb, and is more than likely to use it, in order to bring on the end times and the return of the 12th Imam.

(And you are not incorrect in wondering at this point how he feels about those millions of evangelical Christians over here who encourage belligerence on the part of Israel because of their desire to see the big show open on the plains of Megiddo, starring the famous Disemboweling Christ, action hero of the Left Behind novels. Rather not have those folks influencing nuclear policy myself.)

But he doesn't really reach full bloom until he's talking about ethics, and decency, and "living a moral life." It is here where his sanctimony, his hypocrisy, and his carefully refined dickitude truly burst forth in interesting ways. He was asked last night about the recent revelations of "insider trading" among members of Congress. He began his answer carefully, parsing the legitimate difference between actual insider trading of the kind that takes place on Wall Street, and the kind of thing in Congress most recently exposed by 60 Minutes in which members of the Congress trade on information concerning pending laws that might effect certain industries.

Forgive me for a moment if I now bring out the tin drum again and point out that, as one of Jack Abramoff's primary rentboys in the Senate, Santorum is well qualified to make this Jesuitical distinction. But then he goes on to make a learned simpleton's disquisition on why we have of laws in our society, and we move deeply into the upper branches, the lush green canopy, that overarches his entire purpose in public life, at least as he sees it.

"The point is, this is something we shouldn't even have to have a law for," he says. "People should behave ethically. When people don't behave as they should, we gotta pass laws. Now we have a law, and it has to be enforced, and that means someone has to hire staff to enforce it, and these are people that you pay for, and all because people don't live decent moral lives like they should. If people don't live good decent moral lives, government is going to get bigger."

(As with so many things, Mr. Madison said it better: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.")

Let us unpack this, shall we? First we have the mournful condemnation of the various members of Congress who did these dastardly but altogether legal deeds, which is very rich coming from a guy — tin-drum alert — whose brief on behalf of one of the greatest scams in the history of the Republic included:

Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."

His efforts on behalf of the K Street Project, which eventually redounded to the great benefit of Abramoff, landed Santorum on a watchdog group's list of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress in 2006. And thus did Rick Santorum enable people to avoid living decent moral lives and, by his own logic, thus is Rick Santorum a primary architect of big government in this regard. Ron Paul Is Right!!!!

Even Santorum's unremarkable contention that, if it weren't for criminals, we wouldn't need laws, is wholly reminiscent of the preacher caught out behind the barn with a sheep. Like every other Republican candidate, Santorum favors repeal of the Dodd-Frank law, which was passed as a rather pale attempt to rein in the excesses of the financial industries. He calls it "job-killing." Just last night, he announced his support for a lawsuit contemplated by the Senate Republican leadership to fight President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another appointment held up by those same Republicans because they do not approve of a law duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. Santorum doesn't like that law, either. Last night, he made quite a show of not remembering the name of the CFPB.

But, wait. Don't we need this law? Don't we need a law because a bunch of Wall Street pirates declined to live "good, decent moral lives" as they were stealing most of the national economy and wrecking what was left? Don't we need a law because those people, declining to live good, decent, moral lives, looted pensions, cheated people on mortgages, and left one poor county in Alabama in hopeless debt from now until the 12th Imam really does come back? Aren't the people behind credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of the vehicles of exotic economic pillage the real reason why government had to expand its power in this area? Here, alas, possibly with the sound of Jack Abramoff's voice echoing softly in his ear, Rick Santorum wants people to live "good, decent moral lives" and, yet, if they don't, well, that's just the way it goes.

Let us all be free again to be swindled the same way.

Rick Santorum is yet another example of a conservative to whom "freedom" means protecting the free speech rights of con-men. That's how he managed, during his demi-victory speech in Iowa, to compare much of the social safety net to the actual fascism his grandfather fled Italy to avoid. He treats caveat emptor as a basic principle of human freedom. Toward the end of the evening, he got into a long wrangle about health-care and announced his support for "the Ryan plan," the Medicare phase-out designed by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan. Remember now where he said it — in a well-regarded government-run nursing home containing 200 patients, all of whom depend on Medicare for one reason or another. Rick Santorum believes that these people are not free. If they were, they'd get up tomorrow morning and shop for the best deal they could find on an open market, which naturally would be run by people in the insurance industry who are living good, decent moral lives, especially in their business practices. It was about here where I fell out of the tree.