Goodbye to Santorum

Senator McCreepy departs after an ignominious defeat.

by David Faris

Behind every crummy president in U.S. history lurked a host of misguided, foolish men. George W. Bush, whose compliant GOP-controlled Congress was just routed by the same Democrats most observers had left for dead two years ago, can count on a reduced number of deranged ideologues in the 110th Congress. But voters fired a number of his most epic apologists and enablers in November, including our own soon-to-be-departed national and international embarrassment, Sen. Richard John Santorum.

To call Rick Santorum a rubber stamp for every dipstick policy that was squeezed out of Bush's booze-warped little brain would be a disservice to one of our most valuable cliches. He was a mechanized stamp made out of space-age alloys, applied with malice to every predictably catastrophic snafu of the past six years. Pennsylvania's now former junior senator gleefully signed off on every needless Bush disaster, from the war in Iraq to the absurdist Terry Schiavo grandstanding to the vicious bankruptcy bill that represented the greatest attack on working people since Generalissimo Franco won the Spanish Civil War.

Santorum helped bring you the No Rich White Child Left Behind Act, the Drug Company Profit Enhancement Program known as the Medicare bill and that very important debate about setting fire to pieces of cloth embroidered with the stars and stripes. He voted yea on every debt-increasing budget from his allegedly conservative pals, and like the rest of the corrupt majority, Santorum hasn't lifted a finger to investigate any of this administration's many abuses of authority and unconstitutional arrogations of power.

In addition to swooning like Grey's Anatomy's Meredith for each and every harebrained archconservative fantasy hatched by this administration, Santorum boasted a number of other fabulous qualities, including hating gay people and consistently saying things that embarrassed himself.

In one infamous interview during the thousands of hours wasted on the gay marriage fiasco, Santorum told an interviewer, "In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

The stunned Associated Press reporter told Santorum that his casual use of the sicko hardcore porn term "man on dog" was a wee bit uncomfortable. But that's what Senator McCreepy is all about — making everyone uncomfortable. After an hour with Santorum, most people who believe that Earth was created more than 6,000 years ago probably feel just a little bit violated. That's why Pennsylvania voters kicked his bigoted behind to the curb with a historic 18-point thumping. That's what we call some serious voter-on-incompetent-senator action. People didn't just disapprove of the job Santorum was doing — incumbent senators really have to be loathed to lose by 18 points, particularly to a candidate as uninspiring as Sen.-elect RoboCasey.

And during these, his final days in office, we should remember other mind-blowing remarks for the ages. Who will ever forget another of his gay marriage pearls of wisdom: "Isn't that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?" Pennsylvanians rightly woke up and realized that they could no longer be governed by a person who thinks Osama bin Laden wins every time a man has sex with another man. They also couldn't stomach a senator who compared the war in Iraq to the Eye of Mordor.

Santorum's defenders fell over themselves in the run-up to the election, claiming that a good man was about to be swept away by the Democratic tide. But they had it backwards — it was narrow-minded ideologues like Santorum that got Republicans in hot water in the first place. His well-deserved canning should be treated by the Republican Party as hard evidence of what happens when they allow their party to be captured by obscurantist demagogues who view public policy as an extension of theology.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.