Daily Kos Week in Review: Mullah Santorum and the Condom Police

For months, the Daily Kos gang has trashed the successive not-Romneys in the GOP presidential field, and this past week, post-Iowa, it was Rick Santorum's turn. Unsurprisingly, Santorum's traditionalist-Catholic view of sexual morality raised the hackles of many Kossacks (see the first item for an especially egregious example).

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

Hunter: Santorum voters are unwitting supporters of sharia
 
...This guy, Richard Sharia Santorum, was just crowned co-leader of the Republican presidential race by Iowa voters...
 
...Under a Santorum government...whether you die when you get sick may not be something government should be worrying about, but just try to buy a condom: that'll get the hammer of justice to come crashing down on you, yes indeed.
 
This is what we mean when we invoke phrases like American Taliban...
 
...His brand of religious intolerance is popular, at least among those caucus-goers...

If you called it Sharia Law you would have most of the same crowd willing to take up arms to prevent it. All it needs to be popular with those very same people is a different name. (This is not a subtle crowd, or one that cottons to deep thinking, or apparently any thinking at all.)

So the next Not Mitt Romney...is an aspiring mullah who has dedicated himself to the notion that he is God's personally appointed inquisitor into the sexual mores of the populace...

Troubadour: Obama for Rushmore!

...Barack Obama is either the best President we've ever had, or more humbly, equal to the best Presidents we've ever had...
 
Without meaning to belittle the past, frankly Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union don't seem nearly as insurmountable in comparison - at least from the perspective of the White House. When taken in the context of...the transmogrification of the GOP into an ultra-malignant, treasonous crime syndicate, the disfigurement of news media into an engine of lunatic partisan propaganda, and the total domination of petty corporate tyranny over every aspect of our lives, the problems we confront today come to seem like the greatest challenges this nation has ever faced...The closest President to have faced comparable conditions to Obama would be Lincoln, and frankly Lincoln had it easier...
 
...Faceless corporations own our homes, own our cars, draw the zoning lines in our cities to benefit themselves, take over roads and public spaces (and police! and jails!), tells us where we can go and when, educates our children in how to be obedient workers and insatiable consumers, and "informs" us of what they want us to know while ignoring anything that does not serve their agenda. Their money now draws from a bottomless international well fed by the slave labor of billions, not mere millions. That is the Uber-Civil War into which Barack Obama became President of the United States...

swellsman: The Republicans' con job exposed

...The GOP has figured out that undecided voters are really low-information voters who are easily convinced to vote for people who sound “confident,” and that when the GOP is addressing its base it sounds all kinds of confident.  (Also batshit insane, but low-information voters don’t know enough to recognize the insanity; they respond instead to body language and the timbre of the voice, like dogs.)...

Hunter: Conservatism is a fairy tale

...Modern conservatism is anti-reality. It's not merely about political ideologies, it's about baldly denying facts so basic that it would take a sane person all of ten seconds to look it up. If you're conservative "enough", you're not allowed to look them up. And you're supposed to get very, very angry when someone else looks them up, too.

All of this is in service to some notion of magical fairies that, if only you just properly believe in them, will alter time and space so that you don't have to tax your brain with anything that might make you sad...

Crashing Vor: GOPers are wrong and rude

...From now until November, when someone races to pass so that they can claim a place in front of me at a red light, or runs their stuffed shopping cart over my foot so they can beat me to the express line...I will no longer reach into the sack of familiar profanities and pejoratives. Nor will I attempt the ever-futile, icy "Excuse me?"

No, this year I will answer every rude, self-involved, craniorectal act with the same, simple adjective.

"Wow, how Republican." "Way Republican, dude." "That is SO Republican."

This appellation is effective in two ways. It tags the behavior with a group of Americans who have spent untold effort identifying with the privileged and telling everyone else to kiss off...

Secondly, it cements that identification further. Traffic laws don't apply to you?...Willing to mace somebody for a pair of Air Jordans? How ve-ry Re-pub-lic-an.

Republican. Synonym for socially unacceptable, totally dickheaded beyond-the-paleness...