It's No Accident

Rick Santorum left a steaming pile of . . . well, santorum on the editorial pages of the Post-Gazette today. I decided to have a little fun with him and send a letter to the editor. The PG is pretty clearly turned off to Man-on-Dog Ricky these days, so I think there's a good chance it will get printed. Readers of this blog get a special treat in seeing it before it goes under the editor's knife, though.

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Dear editor:

Rick Santorum's column on Thursday ("In Rebuttal: Islamic fascists vs. Islam itself") provides yet more proof that he thinks the voters of Pennsylvania are stupid. He either knows nothing about the Middle East, or he is deliberately lying when he lumps Syria and Iran together as "Islamic fascist" regimes.

I will give the Senator the benefit of the doubt -- such as it is -- and assume that he is merely being frivolous in so carelessly throwing around a term like "fascism." Others will be less charitable and will observe that "it takes one to know one."

In characterizing the Syrian government as "Islamic," though, the Senator is simply making stuff up. The Iranian government is Islamic, but the Syrian one is militantly secular, and has dealt harshly with political Islamists in the past, most notoriously at Hama in 1982. Yet when the Syrians crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising at Hama, they were heavily criticized for it by both the United States and Israel, since in those days the Sunni fanatics were "our allies" in undermining the Syrian government.

All of these facts are easily available to anyone interested in knowing some of the basics about the Middle East. But Santorum assumes that the rest of us are lazy enough to take his every pronouncement at face value. Doubling as a deluded fantasist and a congenital liar, he piles small and routine lies (like his one about Syria) on top of his larger ones: the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that you will benefit from Social Security privatization.

I only regret that we have so many months to go before we can finally be rid of this walking insult to human decency.

JOHN LACNY
Brookline
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Technorati tags: Santorum, Syria, Iran, fascism, frothy mixture