On Monday, the Daily Kos covered the Saturday night GOP debate in Iowa with a typical headline "Republicans pander to American Taliban." (Who's doing the pandering? That's also the title of the latest book by Kos bloglord Markos Moulitsas.) Jed Lewison insisted Rick Santorum was Talibanesque when he said, in the Washington Post account: “As long as abortion is legal in this country... we will never have rest because that law does not comport with God’s law.”
Lewison proclaimed: "So the next time you hear Rick Santorum complain about government imposition of Sharia law, keep in mind that he doesn't have a problem with violating the separation of church and state. To him, the only thing that matters is whether the government is imposing his beliefs." (Italics in the original.) Blogs like Right Wing Watch (from People for the American Way) seized on the answer.
This is the fuller answer from Santorum: "Unlike Islam, where a higher law and the civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws, but our civil laws have to comport with the higher law. Our civil laws – and that’s why the issue of abortion -- As long as abortion is legal in this country, at least according to the Supreme Court, legal, we will never have rest because that law does not comport with God’s law, which says that all life has value, all if is created by – I knew you in the womb – and as long as there is a discordance between the two, there will be agitation."
PFAW's Kyle Mantyla similarly sneered: "So, to clarify: In Islam, God's laws and the civil laws are one-and-the-same and that is theocracy and that is bad ... whereas here in the United States, our civil laws merely must be in accordance with God's law, and that is not theocracy and that is good."
It's just another issue where the Left poses as some kind of secularist Arab Spring, and the conservatives get to be the hidebound Islamic radicals.
Also at the Daily Kos, Laurence Lewis cried crocodile tears that Santorum wasn't getting his chance to be front-runner for a week:
So now it's Newt Gingrich's turn. The Republican desperation for a viable and committed conservative candidate has lurched over the past year from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michelle Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich. It's fun just to write that. And there have even been blips on the radar screen about Ron Paul. The only person who seems perpetually in the doghouse is poor Rick Santorum. No love. Ever. And given that he's a legitimate moron with comfortably Medieval views on science and social issues, he would seem a natural fit. It's sad.
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