I have laughed at this picture so many times that I don’t even need Photoshop to put a dick in it.

Speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington yesterday, Rick Santorum said that conservatives “will never have the elite, smart people on our side.” Don’t worry; he made a face when he said “smart people,” so everyone would understand. Santorum knows that smart people are dumb, and people who oppose his plan to make a series of laws against abortion and gay sex and selling liquor on Sundays “want to tell you what to do.” Quote:

We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do.

On first blush, it’s an airtight logical argument. It’s possible there are a couple of holes, though, and they go beyond whether Santorum was being sarcastic, as David Weigel oddly argues. You get that straw man, David Weigel—shake him! Video after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n5oa55EsmI

 Probably you have already seen this video or a quote therefrom on Facebook, where as of this morning it had over 20,000 shares. I personally love it when Santorum talks about smart people, because it makes me want to rise up off the ground and drink everybody’s blood. Being smart is not a choice. Doing smart is a choice, as BA/MBA/JD Santorum knows. You can try to figure stuff out and follow what you figure out wherever it takes you, or you can go around telling church people and bigots that they knew everything of importance by age fifteen.

You can pick either of those options no matter how smart you are. The only problem is that if you are smart and you choose to do dumb, you will be faced with another choice: whether to kill your inquisitive spirit and sense of truth so you fit right in with the people to whom you pander, or to keep allowing yourself to think and live with the certainty that you are exploiting them.

Which returns us to the perennial question of Rick Santorum. The two-term senator from Pennsylvania made a tenacious run for the presidency this year, and it’s not because the people clamored for him. Until the end, when several other candidates had self-immolated, he consistently polled in the single digits. Yet the attorney/master of business administration stuck it out, insisting until the bitter end that America wanted him to be president. There are two possible explanations for this behavior:

1) He believes that his god compels him to advance an agenda of unpopular social restrictions for the greater good.

2) He really, really wants to tell people what to do.

Do you see where I’m going with this? There are two potential Rick Santorums. One of them hates smart people, and just as soon as he finished his graduate degrees in business and law, he joined the legislative branch so he could protect decent, ordinary folks from their machinations. The other possible Rick Santorum is ambitious and intelligent, and yesterday he told a national convention sponsored by Liberty University that being smart is bad, because those people want to tell you what to do.

Maybe he meant it. Maybe, though, the part of Rick Santorum that thinks about what’s true kind of enjoyed the phrase “we will never have the smart people on our side,” the way Darth Vader enjoyed throwing his boss into a well. I like to think of that moment of sardonic hyperbole—not sarcasm, I want to emphasize—as a little wave from the window of Santorum’s Bob Saget facade.

He is a huckster and a demagogue, and he would happily make the whole country worse so he could be president of it. Somewhere in his mind, though, is a little voice that says “you’re exploiting these people” every time he starts talking about those damned elites. That voice speaks the truth, and Santorum cannot but hear it. Those smart people think they’re better than you, he tells us, and they want to tell you what to do. It is a rare moment of honesty from a professional liar.

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