Two miscast candidates for the GOP

[Geee]

Human Events:

WASHINGTON -- The Midwest begins on the western slopes of the Allegheny Mountains, around Rick Santorum's Pittsburgh, birthplace of the Ohio River, the original highway into the Midwest. Pittsburgh fueled the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an early eruption of Western resentment of the overbearing East, which taxed the whiskey that Westerners made from their grain. Santorum the Midwesterner, after victories in Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, is waging more of his political capital on the region.

 

Rather than wait for Super Tuesday's (March 6) congenial calendar featuring five culturally conservative states (Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Idaho), he is contesting Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and Ohio. But instead of keeping his Rust Belt focus on his blue-collar roots and economic program for reviving manufacturing, he has opened multiple fronts in the culture wars.

 

By doing so -- questioning much prenatal testing, disdaining Barack Obama's environmentalism as "phony theology," calling involvement of even state governments in public education "anachronistic," reiterating that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest, explaining the proper purpose of sex (procreation) -- Santorum has eclipsed Newt Gingrich, his rival for the support of social conservatives. But in doing so Santorum has made his Catholicism more central and problematic in this nomination contest than Mitt Romney's Mormonism has been.

 

The problem is not that the phenomena that trouble Santorum are unserious. The use of prenatal testing for search-and-destroy missions against Down syndrome and other handicapped babies is barbaric. Obama's stealthy pursuit of a national curriculum for grades K through 12 is ill-advised and illegal. And no domestic problem -- not even the unsustainable entitlement state -- is more urgent and intractable than that of family disintegration.

 

The entitlement state can be reformed by various known -- if currently politically impossible -- policy choices. But no one really knows the causes of family disintegration, so it is unclear whether those causes can be combated by government measures.

[Pepper]

"But no one really knows the causes of family disintegration" -- G. Will

 

??

 

 

Perhaps not an exhaustive list, but most adults can list a dozen reasons immediately.