The Santorum message

Much of Rick Santorum's moralizing may be valid, for him and probably for a lot of people. Family is good. Community is good. Responsibility is good.

But that is irrelevant. It's been known for a long, long time that we each need to come to our own relationship with the universe, our god, our higher power, our society. We do not change because some angry, tight-lipped moralizing, demeaning male is telling us how awful we are.

He doesn't have a right to get involved in my relationships. I don't want to go live in his house. I just won't. Regardless of that episode where he and his wife took the dead fetus home to their kids.

I actually liked Santorum's dressing down of the New York Times reporter who tried to set him up yesterday over comments about Romney. Santorum was right, it was unfair and taken out of context. That the reporter seemed speechless was telling in itself.

But what was not okay was how he responded. His facial expressions. His body language. The anger, the sarcasm, the belittling, the threat. This is an unpleasant man. A strident and ill-humored man. This is a man we all have known elsewhere in our lives, and may have been on more than one occasion, and are hopefully are trying to change.

It doesn't matter if he is right. His self-righteousness is wrong. It shows a fatal character flaw for one who has the might of America at his fingertips.

Is there a place for outrage? Yes. Do I trust Santorum? No, I don't trust any zealot, Santorum is as much a zealot as any mullah in Pakistan. And we don't want him to have the bomb, either.