Discourse

This is what it's come to. This is what Rick Santorum says to his adoring base:

"They don't believe you can make these decisions because if you were allowed to make these decisions you would obviously jump off a cliff. Don't you see how they see you? How they look down their noses at average Americans? These elite snobs!"

"I believe that if we are unsuccessful in this election ... it will have horrendous consequences. ... It will be the end of the great experiment in the order of liberty and freedom."

"This is right out of the FDR playbook. Continue to grow government get more and more people on government programs. More and more dependency. ... This is what it's all designed to do -- gradually erode your freedom and increase your dependency on government. This is a chance for Americans to stand up and say... we... will... be... free."

"When it was all the rage ... I stood and said, 'This isn't climate science. This is political science.' And guess who turned out to be right. ... The president still believes this garbage. Why? Because this is how The Left wants to control.... Why? You can't be trusted with freedom."

"Not a word we hear much in America any more — 'honor.' Have people trying to tell us that's one of those old, antiquated terms that really doesn't apply to America any more."

"There are people around this country, mostly in universities, Hollywood, corporate boardrooms, sadly, who believe that that time has passed. That things are just too complex, and we need those who are 'smarter,' who are the elite in society, to be able to manage our affairs."

I've said this before: when you campaign on rhetoric like this, stoking apocalyptic fear and hate, counting on them to get votes no matter what, characterizing those with whom you disagree as evil incarnate, caring neither about what's true nor about the consequences of winning on such a message, the wreckage left behind -- the absence of any chance of or desire for reconciliation, the perpetual sense of grievance and self-pity -- there'll be nothing left of governance. You'll be seeing to it that your fevered vision comes true; not because the shadows you imagine to be real are, in fact, real, but because of the cracks in the foundation you've deliberately made.

If this guy (who, it turns out, doesn't even respect Protestants, ferchrissakes) gets the Republican nomination (not that Romney's lies are any better), whether or not he were to win the general election, it'll bespeak a level of insanity on the right from which we may never recover, from which they'll never retreat. Especially when, according to such as Santorum, the president is literally unholy. This is not the discourse of reconciliation, ever. Here we are, what all of them consider the most exceptionally exceptional country in the universe, seeking refuge in hatred of half of ourselves, and calling that holy.

[Sadly, much as I'd sort of like to see a campaign of Santorum v. Obama, for the sheer incredulity it'd surely produce, it's starting to look like he's getting too crazy for that. Not that anything he'd say would be a turnoff to teabaggers or Christianists; but when he claims public funding for education is "an anachronism," I'm thinking it could be a bridge too far even for those few remaining Republicans who could be considered thoughtful.]