Ron Paul is so full of self-righteously reactionary b.s. it's sickening, until one watches him gut and fillet one of his opponents with it, which he just did to the even more self-righteous Rick Santorum.
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In the GOP it has come to this: Santorum defending his earmarks, the state-interested distribution of which is a senator's job.
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Santorum says he opposed the Wall Street bailout "on principle" because he preferred the markets to work. The markets were working -- we were in near-complete financial meltdown. Without the bailout we would have melted to irreversible doom. The entire point of the bailout was to stop the markets from doing the prodigious harm they were doing to every working-class American. Is that so hard to understand and accept?
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It's easy for us Americans to feel our cultural superiority over, say, the primitive barbarity of Afghans, who riot and murder over "insults" to inanimate iconography. Yet that feeling becomes a bit elusive when we watch the likes of presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who not only believes in the real and physical presence of a Hellish bogeyman, but because of that is by God the front-runner in one of our two major parties.
What happened? Did the entire world climb into a rickety time machine and set course for the 13th century? And if so, why do I still get cable? How is it that I just watched Santorum, who is miles and miles away at the Arizona State Monastery, defend a belief system in a Scholastically evasive and Sophistic way that makes Augustine of Hippo look like Timothy Leary?
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Oh dear, they've been reduced to a violent spat over ... Arlen Specter.
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You know, Newt just might slip through all this bickering and come out ahead in Michigan. Not out front, just farther ahead than expected. Because Mitt and Rick are coming across as petty squabblers, and the GOP base likes monstrously cyclopean squabblers.
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There goes Mitt again: promising to slash taxes, vastly increase defense spending, and cap and balance the budget. The old scams just never get too old for this tiresome bunch.
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Romney asserts point blank that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, "it will be used." What epistemological foundation does he have for that assertion? None. Absolutely none. Yet he calls Obama irresponsible. It's really quite breathtaking.
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If any of these three -- i.e., excluding Paul -- were to be elected president, we'd be looking at WWIII. What epistemological foundation do I have for that assertion? I'm looking at it, I'm listening to it. These clowns are horrifying.
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And that's a wrap.
This is dangerous work. It's pushing the limits of my assorted, recovering chemical dependencies.