This information is old news in the world of political junkies, but since Santorum is (momentarily) the hottest notRomney on the ticket, I’ll give Santorum the fifteen minutes of attention (it won’t go past that I guarantee you) he so desperately craves.
The Santorums took their miscarried fetus home for the night to meet the rest of the family. Exerts think this is unusual. I wonder if ABC thought to ask the cast and crew of their newsroom what they thought about it? I asked twenty of my non-expert friends if they had ever heard of such a bizarre thing. These folks are, on average, about fifty years old, so between the group of twenty, there is something like a thousand years of recent American cultural history to be culled. None could provide an example of any person they’d ever heard of doing something so bizarre. When asked to select a single word to describe such a practice, no one said “unusual”. Weird, freakish and bizarre were the modifiers most prevalent in the responses. A couple of my friends also thought it bordered on child abuse to submit his living children to such an ordeal, but Santorum is a devout Catholic so I’ll give him a pass on that. After all, child abuse is pretty low on the radar of Catholic mortal sins which Santorum is so passionate about.
There are also screams of disgust from the usual rightwing apologists, not about the incident itself, but the sudden high profile exposure of this extremely aberrant incident. “Why are you prying into the private affairs of family?” and “Have you no shame?” seem to be about the best that the rightwing sycophants can come up with. Their protestations of media exposure might hold some water if the “bring dead fetus home for the night” story had been born of a late night paparazzi stalking the Santorum household instead of being included in his wife’s book:
In her book, Karen Santorum wrote about bringing the body home to their other children.
This freakish incident was something his wife thought was worth sharing to the rest of the world, so it’s hardly a reasonable argument that people shouldn’t be talking about it! So let’s talk but let’s not judge. Just because 99.9% of Catholics probably don’t follow the ‘bring dead baby home for the night’ sacrament doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. It’s not like Rick was really electable anyway, given his bronze age beliefs in so many other areas, but there is no way people are going to vote for a FREAK and whatever else you think about Rick, this incident with the dead fetus is definitely freakish.
Here’s a great example of an apologist post I ran into while researching this entry. I still have the taste of astroturf in my mouth from reading it.
So Romney is a shoo-in unless people actually take that tired, old worn-out cliche of “Who would you like to drink a beer with? to heart. Romney is part of a “suspect” religion that doesn’t allow drinking and Santorum is too freakishly up tight to enjoy it. Under that scenario the nomination is either going to Ron Paul or Sarah Palin.
Seriously: At the end of the day, Romney will get the nomination precisely because the religious extremist movement in this country isn’t strong enough to stop the corporate interests behind him. Obama will crush Romney of course, but in the meantime it’ll be fun to watch all the religious extremists go absolutely bonkers at being shoved back into the shadows once more. Thank goodness the religious crazies are doing the work of undermining and ridiculing themselves better than Christopher Hitchens even dreamed of.
Enjoy.
The Tim Channel 