Agenda for the Dark Ages: GOP Frontrunner Rick Santorum's 5 Most Extremist Themes

Photo Credit: A.M. Stan

If Santorum gets to bear the standard for the GOP, the party moves even further to the right. Here's a taste of what's on that plate.

February 22, 2012

It says quite a lot about the state of the Republican Party that the right-wing extremist Rick Santorum -- a politician so despised by his own Pennsylvania constituents that he lost his U.S. Senate seat by an 18-point margin -- is now the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. And not by a little, I might add -- by 10 points, according to that latest national tracking poll by Gallup.

As increasing numbers of people identify themselves as independent voters -- independent of the major political parties, that is -- the essence of the Republican Party has distilled into a toxic brew of resentment, prejudice, anti-intellectualism and misogyny. In truth, the party has been headed this way for a long time, but the election of Barack Obama -- a moderately liberal African American man with an African-Islamic name -- offered the perfect catalyst for the alchemists of the right to convert their everyday potion of pique into something far more fortified.

Enter Rick Santorum, a presidential candidate regarded as little more than a joke a mere month ago. Santorum presents himself as everything Obama is not, and represents the opposite of everything those anti-Obama right-wing tropes, the lies both whispered and shouted, purport the president to be. There are liberals who relish the possibility of a Santorum nomination; at the Daily Kos, founder Markos Moulitsas is urging liberals to vote for Santorum in open primaries, on the reasonably sound theory that Santorum is too crazy to win the presidency. Perhaps.    READ MORE