More Rats Deserting the Good Ship Bushit

When you have someone like Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum in your corner, or rather, so far up your ass that he doesn't know where he ends and you begin, you figure that he not only may be politically ambitious, but a true believer too. All the better, you think, because the true believers are so easily duped. Santorum's desire to climb all the way to a run for the presidency was bolstered by the apparent power of the evangelical-Catholic coalition which wants no abortion, no contraception, no homosexual acts, and the permanent installation of women as slavish factories for reproduction, and he saw the coattails of el presidente Chimpie as a way to prove his bona fides to this group.

But Ricky must have needed a breath of fresh air after so many months in Chimpie's colon sucking down methane, so he pulled his head out to inhale oxygen and discovered the Bush maybe wasn't so popular any more with that core group of religious and sexual theofascists that yearn for a return to the dark ages. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sums it up nicely:

It has been an unquestionably brutal summer for the president -- from waning support for the Iraq war, to the slow and almost certain death of his plan to restructure the Social Security system, to criticism over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, to concern about gas prices and the economy. If those trends continue, a looming question for candidates like Mr. Santorum is to what extent the public's dissatisfaction with the administration will spill over into the midterm elections in 2006.

A sinking Chimpie wouldn't trouble a true believer one bit--look at that core 26 percent who think the country is on the right track--but when you have ambitions that are more secular, like someday running for president, the role of the out-of-power martyred true believer becomes less attractive, even if it is the right thing to do given your previous pronouncements of "principle" regarding allegedly conservative ideas.

Is Santorum, then, really just another opportunistic relativist in Christian clothing, ready to turn Brutus to Chimpie's Caesar?

In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette several weeks ago, Mr. Santorum said for the first time that the White House had stumbled badly in its handling of the Social Security issue, and compared Mr. Bush's decision to demand a restructuring of the Social Security system immediately after the contentious 2004 election as "taking a 3-iron to a beehive."

Two weeks ago, Mr. Santorum startled some conservatives and tax lobbyists when he said the costs of Hurricane Katrina had made it necessary for Republicans to reconsider whether they should extend some of the president's tax cuts -- such as the lower rate on capital gains and dividends passed in 2003.

"There's a chance we may not extend some of those provisions this year," Santorum told radio host Don Imus, adding that Congress might not do "as much in the way of tax relief as we had originally scheduled or target some of that tax relief to the affected areas."

So Ricky-boy in one fell swoop cuts himself away from the web in which he had been gleefully entwined, the web that held religious wingnuts and libertarians alike in thrall of Bush: tax cuts and gutting Social Security. And yet Santorum is no dummy--he still needs the Chimpie juggernaut to keep him, if not legitimate, at least financially solvent.

If Mr. Santorum does distance himself from White House policies over the next year -- one area where he is certain to retain their help is in fund raising. Just two weeks from now, Vice President Dick Cheney will hold another fundraiser for Mr. Santorum in Shavertown, Pa..

"It's a delicate balancing act," said Carroll J. Doherty, associate director of Pew Research Center for People and the Press. "This president, he's had a rough stretch, but he still commands loyalty from around 80 percent of Republicans, which is not inconsiderable. ... He has enormous assets to bring to the table."

So as hard as I've been on the Democrats for being weak-kneed with regard to what should be their core principles, it's nice to see that opportunity, greed, power hunger, and unprinicpled gutlessness exist on both sides of the spectrum. Third party, anyone?