One of our esteemed leaders here at the Giant Orange Satan just mentioned his lack of energy to parse out the pure, insipid spite and condescension of this speech by Rick Santorum.
While I am not nearly as talented as the kick-ass writer that Hunter has shown himself to be, I have some energy to spare today, so here's a bit of dissection of Ricky's insanity, below the lovely squiggle...
First, in case you missed it, the text that Hunter found so disagreeable:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...
This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America.
If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America's preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.
He didn't have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.
He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they're smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.
And you say "what could be the impact of academia falling?" Well, I would have the argument that the other structures that I'm going to talk about here had root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.
And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the Church.
After that, you start destroying the Church and you start destroying academia, the culture is where their next success was and I need not even go into the state of the popular culture today. Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.
The fourth, and this was harder, now I know you’re going to challenge me on this one, but politics and government was the next to fall. You say, ‘you would think they would be the first to fall, as fallible as we are in politics,’ but people in political life get elected by ordinary folks from lots of places all over the country where the foundations of this country are still strong. So while we may certainly have had examples, the body politic held up fairly well up until the last couple of decades, but it is falling too
Upon rereading this, I don't blame Hunter one bit. Just reading it weakens my will to live. But in the spirit of helping be my neighbor’s keeper (quite a Christ-like impulse, don’t you agree, Mr. Santorum?), I offer this analysis, which I’m sure can be improved upon by this esteemed company here at the dKos.
Item 1: Who would you attack, if you were Satan?
Not being Beelzebub myself, nor having ever met the guy, it’s difficult to put myself in his pointy red shoes. But I would say that, in terms of a large sized population that could be captured to become my minions in hell, the most target-rich environment in our world today would be China.
China has 1.34 billion people, who are moving to the much more spiritually-dangerous urban areas in large numbers. There is rampant use of birth control and abortion, to keep to the “one child” policy in place in that country since 1979. Their attendance at “liberalizing” universities is rapidly increasing as well. So Mr. Santorum, faulty logic there...
Item 2: Satan had no luck fomenting his evil in the early years of our Republic, did he?
Oh, dear.
We have the Trail of Tears, in 1838, where our country systematically wiped out a generation of native Americans through their forced relocation to Western lands.
Our country was built upon the backs of slave labor; the evils of slavery (the Fugitive Slave Act, treatment of slaves, inability of slaves to earn their freedom, Dred Scott decision etc. ad infinitum) most certainly fall into the category of the diabolical.
In the antebellum era, scholars have documented over 2800 lynchings in ten southern states.
I think forced relocations leading to genocide, and slavery and lynching can accurately be described as Satanic activity, so another failure of logic here, Mr. Santorum.
Item 3: Colleges have fallen to Satanism
Hm. This is harder to track. But one could easily infer that if Satan was gaining a strong foothold in the United States, the number of folks worshiping him would be increasing at a significant rate. Sadly for Mr. Santorum, there appears to be little evidence for such an increase.
Conversely, American university researchers have been using their talents in amazing ways for the past 200+ years, contributing to everything from the study of genetics, to hundreds of life-saving medical interventions (medicines, procedures, techniques and diagnostic tools), to the discovery of the universe’s expansion. American university researchers have improved the lives of all Americans.
In fact, Mr. Santorum’s family has no doubt benefited from the work of American collegiate researchers, when college-educated doctors, nurses and other treatment specialists cared for his daughter during her recent illness.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is the first American pediatric-focused hospital, founded by college-educated doctors to serve pediatric patients. The legacy of this institution can be found in the health and well-being of countless children across the United States, due to the many advances in pediatric treatments which have emerged from this facility.
So to claim that all American colleges have fallen to Satanism would be to claim that nothing positive has come of university educations for, say, the past 100 years. If that were true, his daughter would be dead. For that reason alone, he might want to revise that claim.
But there's also the fact that Mr. Santorum himself has three college degrees, from American universities. How, Mr. Santorum, did you achieve a Bachelor's degree from the satanic Penn State, an MBA from the evil University of Pittsburgh, and a law degree from demonic Dickinson School of Law, without succumbing to Satanism?
Item 4: Mainline Protestantism has fallen to Satan?
Hm. Well, there’s plenty of examples of Protestant faith leaders who have failed their congregations in one way or another. Jim Bakker (fraud, conspiracy), Ted Haggard (prostitution, drug use, homosexual relationships), Henry Lyons (fraud, money laundering, tax evasion), George Rekers (gay prostitution)… prominent Protestant leaders frequently commit serious crimes.
I might argue, however, that the Catholic Church has been the scene of many, many more heinous crimes in the past thirty years.
This problem is world-wide, not just focused in the United States. The amount of Satanic activity happening in Catholic church facilities and perpetrated by Catholic clergy should be leading Mr. Santorum to a very serious critique of the Church and its officials, for allowing Satan to grab such obvious control over Its Holy offices.
Item 5: Our culture has fallen to Satan…
Wow. Our culture is such a huge and varied thing, it’s difficult to pinpoint what Mr. Santorum means here. One thing he mentions specifically are manners, and here, surprisingly, I agree with Mr. Santorum: our manners need fixing. Here are some prominent examples of horrible manners that have been used in our public culture over the past little while:
--Mr. Limbaugh has bad manners.
--Mr. Breitbart has bad manners, as does Ms. Coulter.
--Mr. Breitbart lies to people, which is also bad manners.
--Mr. Beck's racist bad manners.
--Sadly, Mr. Santorum HIMSELF has used bad manners while speaking in public, too.
But I don’t really remember Mr. Santorum calling out these individuals (or himself) on their heinous behavior. Do you?
Item 6: Our politics have fallen to Satan
Well, Mr. Santorum, you may have me there. A world ruled by a just, kind, and loving god would never give us this.
-|-|-| Submitted, humbly, by the Exurban Mom, with the full knowledge that Hunter would have decimated Santorum's faulty logic, evil assumptions, and sheer inanity, to the point where the speech would have looked up at all of us from the ground with simpering puppy-dog eyes and begged for mercy...|-|-|