Don't know if you followed the Santorum shenanigans today. You can read all about it here,but briefly, Alan Colmes went on Fox News and said this:
Colmes claimed Santorum took the baby home, after living for only two hours, and "played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real."
He also intimated that there was something weird about the whole thing (which there was, but then again in the Santorum house perhaps even weirder things happened all the time).
Well, as a general rule I think that you need to be very careful when talking about somebody's dead infant child. I can imagine that this is a subject of some sensitivity to the Santorums.
Anyhow, all sorts of shit rained down on Colmes, to the point that he had to track down Santorum and apologize (alas, it was too late, as Colmes reputation is on life support). So what does Rick Santorum do?
But Colmes' comments provoked an emotional response from the Republican presidential candidate and his wife earlier Monday.
Santorum choked up when asked to respond to the comments at a campaign event in Iowa.
And there it is.
The response any of us would have in this situation - anger that somebody in the media would take something so personal and make it part of a political campaign. A desire to keep private that which is most private. I was so ready, for the first time, ever, to be on Rick Santorum's side.
But alas. It was not to be. This is what he then said:
To some who don't recognize the dignity of all human life, who see it as a blob of tissue that should be discarded and disposed of, this is somehow weird. Recognizing the humanity of your son is somehow weird, somehow odd, and should be subject to ridicule.
Keep in mind, his son was born during the second trimester, so would have been in the Roe v. Wade abortion window. Santorum took a stupid statement made by one guy - a guy who works for Fox News! - and spinning it as representing pro-choice people who think that dead second-trimester fetuses are just peachy. He turned his own personal tragedy into a lie, and then ran with it in order to score points in the culture wars and gain more support among the more extreme anti-abortionists.
He took the most personal thing, and is using it as chum in the hunt for a friggin' political office.