Like most Americans, I was shocked at the results of the Iowa caucuses. How, I wondered, could Rick Santorum rise to the top of the Republican presidential contest? Santorum is among the most ideologically extreme leaders in the GOP.
Searching for insight, I found one explanation for Santorum’s success in the words of another Republican radical: Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck said on his radio show, “I think the next President has got to be Abraham Lincoln, he has got to be somebody who knows exactly who he is, knows exactly where he stands and is willing to, in the end, turn those reins of power back over. The temptation and the pressure is going to be absolutely enormous. If there is one guy out there that is the next George Washington, the only guy that I could think of is Rick Santorum.”
If you take Glenn Beck at his word, and you trust Glenn Beck’s judgment, then you shouldn’t vote for Rick Santorum. After all, Beck says that the next President of the United States has to be Abraham Lincoln. But, Beck then says that Rick Santorum isn’t Abraham Lincoln at all. He’s the next George Washington instead.
Of course, Glenn Beck’s logic simply got garbled, as often happens for him. If we take the larger attempted point that Rick Santorum would make a great next President of the United States, though, we’re still left with a problem.
How can the next President of the United States be the next George Washington? The very essence of George Washington, the reason that he’s significant in American history, is that he wasn’t the next anything. George Washington was the first President of the United States. There can’t be the next first President. That doesn’t make any sense.
Rick Santorum isn’t like George Washington in any other way, either. He isn’t a great military leader. Santorum wasn’t an effective leader in Congress. George Washington was never voted out of power. Rick Santorum was.
Most importantly, George Washington was regarded as an effective leader because he was absolutely non-partisan. George Washington was the only President in American history who rejected the idea of political parties. Rick Santorum has always been a strident Republican partisan.
What on earth could Glenn Beck have been getting at when he compared Rick Santorum to George Washington? The thing George Washington was most famous for was his leadership in the violent overthrow of one government in order to establish a new kind of government. Is Glenn Beck trying to suggest that Rick Santorum would begin an armed revolution against the democracy of the United States of America?
Whichever way you look at it, this George Washington meme can only expose Rick Santorum’s profound inadequacies. Santorum is no Washington, and he’s not up to the task of commanding the Oval Office.
We’ve created a new collection of anti-Santorum political buttons to aid in the effort to resist Santorum’s growing regressive force. Take a gander.
George Washington may have been “non-partisan”, but he was certainly a conservative. In fact, the entire founding generation was conservative — that is why the Constitution was designed to LIMIT the power of the federal government. The rift between the the partisans of that era — Jeffersonian Democrats v. Federalists – now takes place entirely within the Republican Party, with the former resembling the modern day libertarian philosophy, and the latter resembling the modern doctrinaire conservative.
Obama believes in something alien to the American experience…his entire approach is about EXPANDING government to control people. The founders completely rejected the idea of using government to redistribute private property — in the Federalist Papers, they expressly state that the object of good government is to protect one’s property. Nonetheless, redistribution is a tenet central to Obama’s philosophy. This idea is not American; rather, it was first theorized by Marx and later instilled by Lenin. It is European in nature and based on the idea that the ruling class knows best how to order the lives of the little people.
Rick Santorum wouldn’t make a good president, or vice president, speaker of the house, senator, representative or even be a good leader – as he’s already proven. He was one of the most corrupted politicians we ever had in PA and thats why he was tossed. He’s way too ideologically tied to Christianity (his version) and extreme in his political views.
The problem with big government is that it tries to control everyone EXCEPT the corporations and the monied elite. The problem with small government is that there aren’t enough enforcers of the regulations that corporations must abide by to do business here. Either way the people lose and the corporations win.
The good news is that this whole experiment is going to collapse due to running out of resources. Hopefully it will do so before the entire planet is unfit to inhabit due to extreme pollution, the gift of corporate dominance that keeps on giving.
There is no point electing anyone to any office until the influence of big money and corporate personhood is addressed and corrected. Nothing will change except the faces of the clowns pulling the levers of power for the corporate interests. i doubt even third party or independent candidates could change anything until the internal workings of the system are actually returned to the democratic/checks and balances method . As it is we have no democracy.
forgot the link:
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/04/meet-rick-santorum-anti-romney-or-anti-privacy/
While we’re all being distracted by the political carnival:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28494
Why on earth do you listen to Glenn Beck?
I don’t listen to Glenn Beck. It’s been in the news that Glenn Beck said this, and a quick check to Beck’s site confirms it.
Well who DO you want then??? MItt Romney????
Because it’s one or the other, people.
What I want, Ar, is to build opposition NOW to Rick Santorum, and to Mitt Romney, and to Ron Paul and to Newt Gingrich, instead of having progressives wait, and laze around until halfway through the summer before establishing a network for opposition to these right wing politicians.
George Washington never condemned political parties. He condemned excessive partisanship, what he called the “spirit of party.” He was nonpartisan but at the same time he helped build the Federalist Party. He had members of both parties in his cabinet, and tried very hard to get along with the Democratic-Republican members of his cabinet, but he was a Federalist.
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.