Rickrolled by the Process: Santorum Starts Packing

If former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum wasn't such a phenomenally hateful douchebag, you'd almost have to feel sorry for him.  Apparently his campaign is broke, and he's not even going to stick around Florida for the primary on Tuesday.

Things are not going well for Santorum, even though he officially won Iowa.

He is down nationally, below "officially" racist Congressman Ron Paul, who you may know from the "Ron Paul Political Report," which said such things as:

• the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "seduced underage girls and boys"
• suggesting that New York be named "Zooville" or "Lazyopolis"
• the 1992 Los Angeles riots ended "when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks."
• and "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities."

Wow, maybe Santorum's been reading the "Ron Paul Political Report."

Look, when you're either tied or losing to a guy who suggests that American icon Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. "seduced underage girls and boys," it really is time to pack your shit in and go home.  As the race narrows to Gingrich and Romney, the path forward in several upcoming primary fights -- including Florida -- looks awfully grim for Santorum.

From the HuffingtonPost piece linked in the top paragraph:

Santorum says he would rather spend his Saturday sitting at his kitchen table doing his taxes than campaigning in a state where the race for the Republican presidential nomination has become a two-man fight between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

The cash-strapped candidate acknowledges that he simply can't keep up with the GOP front-runners in Florida.

"We're going to talk about the Constitution and talk about being a strong conservative," Santorum said at an event here this week. "And that's all we can do."

Really, though, this has an awful lot more to do with the process then how terrible a candidate (or person) Rick Santorum is (and please make no mistake: he really, really is both).  Look, the guy won Iowa.  Came in second day-of, but the results showed he won.  Since all Iowa is good for is a headline and momentum going in to New Hampshire, he was robbed of even that.  

Romney won his own virtual home state of New Hampshire (albeit with a less than ideal percentage), and then it was on to South Carolina, where Newt had engineered -- shrewdly, to his credit -- his own rise.  Florida is next, and even though the results proved Santorum to be a winner in Iowa, it was a day late and a dollar short.

After Florida, there aren't a lot of states that look real friendly to Santorum coming up: Nevada?  Maine?  Colorado (actually, I could see him doing better in a place like Colorado, but February 7 seems like a long way away to me).  

It is starting to look like Santorum played our ridiculous, broken process poorly.  And honestly, it's hard for me to think of anyone more deserving of this kind of bad luck and trouble.

Hard... but not impossible. 

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000165090403]

Uh... Okay.
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That was constructive....wasn't it?
Would anyone opposing Obama be a racist or just this set of republicans? I don't care for any of them, for a number of reasons, least of all racism, which you've hardly proven here. I voted for Obama, and will most likely once again, given the choice I have, but I'm not looking forward to 4 more years of stagnation. If there were a serious democratic challenger, Obama would have a hard time winning. I suspect most folks will be voting against the republican nominee and not for the incumbent.

[Benjamin Kirby]

If you don't see how saying that the 1992 L.A. riots ended "when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks" is racist, I'm not sure I can help you.

If creating the largest database of public service opportunities, reversing the 'global gag rule' to allow US aid to go to organizations regardless of whether they provide abortions, regulating the manufacturing, marketing, and sale of tobacco for the first time, signing a new START Treaty, increasing fuel efficiency standards, restoring basic protections against pay discrimination for women and other workers, providing health care to 11 million kids (4 million of whom were previously uninsured), repealing Bush era restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, spending $18 billion for nondefense scientific research and development, preventing credit card companies from imposing arbitrary rate increases on customers, preventing insurance companies from denying insurance because of a pre-existing condition, allowing children to remain covered by their parents' insurance until the age of 26, implementing tax credits for up to 29 million individuals to help pay for health insurance, increasing funding for the Violence Against Women Act, increasing national park funding by 10%, expanding Pell grants, expanding hate crime law, establishing the consumer protection finance bureau, and ending the War in Iraq -- to name a few -- is "stagnation," then maybe you need to get out more. Or at least get a dictionary.

Look, is Obama the perfect progressive candidate? No. But the guy has developed a robust record of accomplishment. The idea that nothing has gotten done in Washington the last four years in mainstream media hooey.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000165090403]

The fraudulent bankers are just now being addressed.
Obama increased troops in the war zones, Killing people from the air, rather than from the ground is still war, don't fool yourself. And he never put the Public Option on the table, which is really how we solve the problem. How do we compete with a system that takes huge profits from healthcare while the rest of the global competition provides it at a cost + % rate like the Mayo Clinic. The war chest isn't being reduced on principle, it's being reduced as a cost cutting measure, or at least on paper. Housing and jobs were really never addressed, but now that it's a convenient re-election issue he can address them and we can watch while these issues begin to be addressed a little late, just behind the curve, just enough to say there's progress without actually pushing the issues hard and fast. Adding 4 trillion dollars to the national debt while nothing is being done about employment and housing is the stagnation that I'm actually addressing. The elephant in the room, what's on most citizens plates. Technology is reducing the need for labor, but citizens, especially the poor, are producing laborers everyday that will only add to the problem. Has Obama really address polluters? The pipeline will go threw, just not until after the election. Was the BP oil dump really addressed? The pollution sits on the bottom and the licenses for deep water drilling have resumed. I'll concede that stagnation was too strong a word, but that doesn't excuse much of what has been a slow and arduous process in some areas of deep concern.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000165090403]

Many, if not most of the rioters in LA were unemployed. Where did they get their money if not from welfare? So, perhaps he or whomever wrote that statement could have selected a more acceptable phrase, but they weren't necessarily inaccurate. Despite what many like to believe this nation was built on accumulated advantage and as long as that continues this nation will have a large percentage of the population that will not accept those who challenge that fundamental format.