Dammit!

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 3 Comments

I accept that my desire to see Rick Santorum win the Republican nomination is destructive and wrong. American politics is not the Puppy Bowl, and we should not just root for the funniest one. Still, the heart wants what it wants. The heart got really excited last night, when it briefly appeared that Santorum might take Ohio. Then boring, sensible America came charging in, and Romney won every district with an airport. Again, that’s good. Rick Santorum should be kept as far from the presidency as possible, for the same reason you don’t keep the octopus with the Christmas lights. But the ugly part of me—the part that wants the comfort of seeing its nihilistic misanthropy confirmed—was hoping to see the GOP’s most absurd candidate take the country’s most predictive state. I suspect that part of me is also the Santorum constituency.

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And on to Super Tuesday

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 7 Comments

"I regard this outcome as desirable."

Mitt Romney has won the Republican presidential primaries in Arizona and Michigan, handily in the former and maybe less so in his home state. He beat Rick Santorum in Michigan by just over three points, suggesting that people whose unemployment rate stayed over 10% for most of 2011 really are worried that dudes might touch one another’s linuses. Either that, or something about a governor’s son who made up for his criticism of the auto bailout by explaining how many Cadillacs he owns just isn’t connecting with people. Meanwhile, level-twelve poop elemental Newt Gingrich beat Ron Paul up north but was beaten by him out west. Gyn’grrch will now be summoned to Georgia by Sheldon Adelson’s ritual burning of several million dollars.

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Religion v. the religious in public life

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 10 Comments

John F. Kennedy, who turned us all over to the papists.

Like Liberace’s dry cleaner, regular readers of Combat! blog may be at risk of Santorum fatigue. I feel your pain, but at the rate Santorum is producing stunning statements, he is either going to be out of the race soon or the most historically significant president of the modern era.  This weekend, the Penn State alum and holder of two postrgraduate degrees called President Obama “a snob” for saying that all Americans should be able to attend college. He also said that John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on the separation between religion and politics made him want to throw up. Even if you can’t bear to hear any more about Santorum, the Times article is worth reading for the part where Mitt Romney bonds with fans at the Daytona 500 by mentioning that several of his friends own NASCAR teams.

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I’m alive. Is Rick Santorum still crazy?

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 1 Comment

Rick Santorum explains the three things government is authorized to do.

The surgery was a success and I am back in the Combat! blog offices, where each intern disguises his horror at my visage more poorly than the last. Seriously, I look like somebody drove a screw into my head. I feel like somebody drove my head into a screw, possibly because I have eaten nothing in the last 36 hours besides painkillers, half a cup of tapioca pudding and maybe two pints of my own blood. So the blog is going to be half-assed. Fortunately for us, Ben al-Fowlkes not only drove my semi-lucid ass home from the clinic yesterday, but also sent me this rad article about a speech Rick Santorum gave in 2008. In it, he warned his audience at Catholic University that “this is…a spiritual war” and that Satan was trying to subvert the United States of America. This man is now a front-runner for the Republican nomination for President.

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Semi-grammatical Santorum attacks public education

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 12 Comments

Pictures into which dicks with cocaine on them must be Photoshopped immediately

Rick Santorum home schools his children. That way they get the full benefit of his mastery of calculus and physics, plus his incisive understanding of history. Speaking in Ohio on Saturday, Santorum explained that public schools are “anachronistic,” having been developed in tandem with the factory system during the American industrial revolution as a means to educate workers. We’re going to ignore the problems with that thesis to consider Santorum’s argument against public schooling, which went like this:

Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.

I’m going to call that an argument in favor of public schools, for several reasons.

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