Swine before Perle: Rick Santorum Ought to Apologize . . . for Being Snookered by a War-Monger!
By causing Ted Kennedy to
snap on the Senate floor yesterday, his fellow Catholic and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania no doubt scored points with his anti-abortion fan club, especially those giddy at the prospect of pulling the presidential lever for him in ’08.
He and they may be called “anti-abortion,” but
not “pro-life,” for Santorum is worse than worthless on
the life issue of our time: Iraq. While
Chappaquiddick’s most famous driver excoriated Santorum for his ignorance concerning Boston’s educational and moral eminence, insurgents were murdering 18 “Saddam-free” Iraqi kids, their hands outstretched for candy from American “liberators.”
But for the “regime change,” which Santorum enthusiastically supports, however, the hornet’s nest that is the insurgency would simply not exist and those kids would be alive.
Kennedy is half-right: Santorum should apologize, but not for riling him up, which at least lets the world know the old windbag bellows still, but for being “snookered,”
as Jude Wanniski put it, by another Rick, i.e., neocon word-wizard Richard Perle.
At least the insurgents do not insult us by invoking Catholic casuistry, as does Santorum: a
peek into the Inner Sanctum Santorum of two years ago reveals a mind drunk with swinish myths of Perle. Their disconnection from reality is risible until one realizes they set off
genuine weapons of mass destruction, bringing in their train a nightmarish existence for ordinary Iraqi people, whose numbers have been violently diminished by 12,000 since Saddam’s ouster, a death toll now increasing at the rate of
800 per month, to outline their suffering no further.
And one belongs in a sanatorium, not the Senate, if one believes, as does Rick, that a dozen years of sanctions counted as a “peaceful means” of persuasion. On this there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Bushi'ite Santorum and Clintonista
Albright.
Imagine if every Iraqi had been asked in early 2003: “Which would you prefer: (a) the continuation of more or less predictable life, such as it is under Saddam Hussein, or (b) the likely prospect of unpredictable violent death of you and your children at the hands of insurgents for whom the Americans will create a window of opportunity in ousting Saddam?” Each of them had the moral right to answer that question for him- or herself. “Pro-Lifers” like Santorum, however, usurped that right, turned their country upside down, and
sent us the bill. Consistent pro-lifers will not allow the entertainment value of his opinions on moral climatology to obscure his culpability.
