Rick Santorum Breaks Big News

American voters will choose between two candidates this election year.

This is the first sentence of his column yesterday. (Also, the Inquirer printed his email address wrong.) Thanks for the big scoop, Ricky!

Obama: A harsh ideologue hidden by a feel-good image [Inquirer]

Rick Santorum Makes Inquirer Debut

Rick Santorum’s much-anticipated Inquirer column debuted today, and the paper didn’t even bother to put his name at the top of the article online. Good start.

After the jump, I dive in to the Santorum.

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Santorum To Pen ‘Inquirer’ Column I Won’t Read

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week has been going great so far, in the sense that I haven’t had to write about it. (Now that I’m doing this post, it is going considerably less swimmingly.)

At Penn the event is actually called Terrorism Awareness Week, because the College Republicans wimped out and changed the name because some groups protested. (At Penn, people will protest anything, including — but not limited to — Harlem Globetrotters victories, the sun coming up and giant robots destroying buildings.)

Ex-Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum will be speaking at the event, but the real story is buried in this Inquirer article about him. It’s even in brackets!

[Santorum also will begin writing an op-ed column for The Inquirer next month, alternating weeks with George E. Curry, the former editor in chief of Emerge magazine and former Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.]

That’s 26 weeks a year of sweet, sweet Santorum, all over your Inquirer. (Ew.) This was originally reported on by Phillymag earlier this year, but it seemed unlikely Santorum would actually ever write this column.

In response to this new Santorum column, Michael Smerconish will begin writing new columns for three different newspapers a week until he has one in every single paper in the area.

After name conflict, groups begin events [Daily Pennsylvanian]
Santorum presses his case against Islamic extremism [Inquirer]
March 1: ‘Inquirer’ Unaware If We Were Still Interested In What Rick Santorum Had To Say, We Would Have Voted For Him

Rick Santorum Would Very Much Like It If You Blew Up And Couldn’t Vote Democrat

Rick Santorum apparently has some sort of info that we don’t, as he said yesterday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that there’s going to be a terrorist attack before the elections so people will vote Republican. How a terrorist attack during a Republican presidential administration would make people vote Republican is beyond me, but Ol’ Ricky says the attack is totally going to keep the Republicans in power.

“Between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public’s going to have a very different view.”

Whee! I can’t wait for the Guiliani/Romney ticket, with Rick Santorum as Secretary of State, ruling over America with their eight Guantanamo Bays and daily terror attacks and our 51st state of Mesoafghaniranistan.

More staged terrorism planned to prevent Ron Paul from winning [Some Ron Paul Blog]
Rick Santorum Will Personally Terrorize America [Wonkette]

Rick Santorum To Get Fat, Make Movies

It may be hard to believe on some levels, but despite losing his U.S. Senate seat to Bob Casey, Rick Santorum still got 1.6 million votes last November.

That’s a pretty sizable audience for the former U.S. Congressman, which only means one thing: Cha-ching! And what better way for a candidate losing a high-profile election to get back into the race than by making a documentary?

Yes, Santorum is hoping to capitalize on the success of such recent documentary filmmakers as Michael Moore, Al Gore, whoever made Spellbound and other filmmakers not pompous enough to put themselves in their own movies. The ex-Senator told the Allentown Morning Call (duh) he is planning on releasing not one but two docs sometime in the future. And as we all know from Gore’s and Moore’s recent efforts, Santorum must all gain approximately 150 pounds in order to really make a good documentary.

Both films are still in the planning stages and don’t have the necessary funding (yet). His first documentary, planned to be about an hour long, will look at the relationship between radical Islam and the “radical leftists in various countries around the world,” because the left really wants the whole world to live under sharia law.

The second doc will “change the culture of America.” I expect to be moving to Virginia and sending my seven kids — I’ll also have to, uh, find a wife to pop those babies out — to a cyber charter school in Pennsylvania after seeing this film.

“Politics and political dialogue has some impact on America but changing the culture has a much bigger impact,” Santorum said about his new role outside the public sector and his push to make documentaries. “That is what the left is doing and doing it in a big way, producing a lot of left content for Hollywood, and even not just out of Hollywood. Even independent films are now more and more left-wing driven, whether it is Michael Moore or Al Gore.”

Hmm, yes, let’s pick two random independent (”independent”) documentaries… hmm… ahh, yes, here’s two random choices: The docs made by Al Gore and Michael Moore. See, the left is making every indie film nowadays!

Moore, Gore… and now Santorum? [Allentown Morning Call]

‘Inquirer’ Unaware If We Were Still Interested In What Rick Santorum Had To Say, We Would Have Voted For Him

Hey journalism kids! Did you find it funny when Mary-Kate Olsen had a column in the New York Times Magazine? Or how about Angelina Jolie’s piece in the Washington Post? Well, it’s about to get better: The Inquirer is in conversations to hire Rick Santorum as a columnist!

Yes, that’s right. In a move sure to piss off Internet bloggers and newspaper writers who’d like to be elevated to columnist status, Inky publisher Brian Tierney and Rick Santorum (at right, palming an invisible basketball) are in negotiations for what Tierney calls “nothing more than blue-sky, guys kicking around ideas.” If it happened, and Santorum sounds more optimistic than Tierney (really?), it’d be a once-a-month thing, and it’d be, uh, quite a coup for the Inquirer, who are apparently also looking at John Fucking Grisham to write a column. (Dean Koontz was unavailable.)

Phillymag’s Jason Fagone writes:

He said his talks with the Inky were “an informal dialogue” and the column “may or may not happen.” … Santorum said that if he were to write an Inky column, “it would be on a variety of different things,” including his work on radical Islam. When we asked him about the chances for the column actually happening, Santorum said, “I’ve got a lot of other things that I’m doing. So part of it is just whether I have time to do it.”

Oh, man. I’m really torn here. Actually, no I’m not. It’d be a hell of a name for the paper to get, and think of the fun I could have mocking it. Shit, it’d be like Christmas every time Santorum penned some screed against secular humanists or radical Islam or what it’s like to live in Virginia.

Breaking: Santorum to Pen Inky Column? [Phillymag]
[Photo via The Hoya]

Santorum To Identify America’s Enemies By Buying Globe

Hey everybody: Rick Santorum’s back! And he’s an employee at a Washington-based think tank! And he’s in charge of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s new “America’s Enemies” program!

Yes, our favorite ex-senator is now in charge of finding enemies for America, and will most likely be paid six figures for helping the think tank come up with ways to convince the president to nuke Iran. He’s also going to join a law firm, which means he’ll be able to send his kids to private school in Virginia, instead of having Pennsylvania taxpayers homeschool his Virginia-based family.

In the National Review Online article by John J. Miller, Santorum says he was a bit too pro-war in the fall — “Maybe that wasn’t the smartest political strategy, spending the last few months running purely on national security. I was even more hawkish than the president.” — and also addresses the name of his new department. In fact, he’s already carving up the world between America and, uh, America.

“It’s a stark name,” says Santorum. “But we wanted to be candid about the fact that America really does have enemies and to point out that the nature of these enemies is much more complex than what people realize. It’s not just Islamic fascism, but also Venezuela, North Korea, and, increasingly in my opinion, Russia.”

Huzzah, huzzah, my friends! Even though we voted him out of the Senate, Rick Santorum is still going to do his best to start some more pointless wars we can die in. Sweet.

Rick’s Return [NRO via Wonkette]

PWD People Of The Year: Rick Santorum

For many things. But, mainly, for this.

Philadelphia Will Do People of the Year | The List So Far
Archives: Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum Continues To Ignore Constituents

The following email forward is making the rounds with the subject “FW: Thanksgiving.” The original message is from Rick Santorum (pictured at right, with a Jew).

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Responding to your message.
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:35:59 -0500
From: SenatorSantorum @ santorum dot senate dot gov

Thank you for contacting me. As always, I appreciate hearing from you. As you may know, the United States Senate is currently in a period of transition. Accordingly, your concerns may be better met by contacting your new Senator, Bob Casey, Jr. You may call the Capitol Switchboard for Senator Casey’s contact information at 202-224-3121. I also recommend that you contact Senator Arlen Specter or your Representative in the House.

Thank you again for contacting me.

Sincerely,
Rick Santorum
United States Senate

If you act fast, you too can have this very own email from “Rick Santorum” delivered to your inbox. Simply contact Rick at SenatorSantorum@santorum.senate.gov and ask him for something!

Laughing Your Way To The Election

Dan Savage — the man who redefined “santorum” — weighs in on Rick Santorum’s defeat:

But there’s a smidgen of credit I will take: I did help to make Rick Santorum into a national laughing stock—an international laughing stock (the new definition of “santorum” is known overseas)—with an invaluable assist from Rick Santorum, of course.

There’s a reason why monarchs and despots used to lock up political cartoonists and satirists. Being made to look ridiculous, being turned into the butt of a joke—that’s politically disempowering fairy dust. It’s hard to rule when you’re not taken seriously, and it’s hard to be taken seriously once you’ve been reduced to a punch line. Indeed, the power of satire should never be underestimated.

Absolutely. One-hundred percent agreement. I read somewhere once that the real tragedy for an American is not to die, but to become a laughingstock. (Some of us, like me, have decided to buck the system and simply become jokes early in our lives.)

So what am I trying to say here? Basically, the next time you read a stupid headline joke, don’t get angry. I’m merely trying to take down Boss Tweed.

Rick Santorum [The Slog via Philly Future]