The best sweater vest is yet to come!

While I have been trying to sleep through the sudden Santorum surge in the hope of making it go away, Ace has a very articulate series of impassioned posts which are not only waking me up, but are making me feel guilty that I am not doing enough. An erstwhile Perry supporter, Ace now faces the charge of RINO-ism — and even with “going Charles Johnson” — simply for sounding the alarm.

The reasoning is simple. If he is the nominee, Santorum will lose, and Obama will win.

What really makes me feel guilty is that it’s looking like my own state, Michigan, will be pivotal. Now that hurts.

And as if Ace hadn’t made me feel guilty enough, an article in Reason highlights the crucial treachery of the Tea Party movement (which I have supported under the naive belief that they would stick to Tea Party principles):

The Tea Party movement was supposed to represent an end to this sort of moralistic Big Government conservatism. Animated by “fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets,” as the Tea Party Patriots’ credo put it, the movement had supposedly put social issues on the back burner to focus on the crisis of government growth.

At one time, Santorum seemed to share this view of the Tea Party — and it troubled him. In that same talk in Harrisburg, he said, “I’ve got some real concerns about this movement within the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement to sort of refashion conservatism and I will vocally and publicly oppose it.”

Santorum needn’t have worried: In this year’s contests, he’s regularly drawn more support from Tea Party voters than Ron Paul, who has been described as the “intellectual godfather of the Tea Party movement.”

Exit polls show Santorum beating Paul among self-described Tea Party supporters in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, trailing him only in independent-heavy New Hampshire and Nevada.

A recent Time magazine symposium asked leading thinkers on the Right, “What Is Conservatism?” Anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist offered this answer: “Conservatives ask only one thing of the government. They wish to be left alone.”

Tell that to Santorum, whose agenda rests on meddling with other people, sometimes with laws, sometimes with aircraft carrier groups.

“This idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do,” Santorum complained to NPR in 2006, “that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues … that is not how traditional conservatives view the world.”

That version of conservatism has a new standard bearer, and he’s rising in the polls.

It is easy for me to sit around and gripe, and also very easy for me to wash my hands of any responsibility and make this yet another argument for “WHY I AM NOT A CONSERVATIVE.”

But I would be less than honest if I failed to point out that even from a conservative standpoint, the only things that seem to be “conservative” about Rick Santorum are his stands on abortion, homosexuality, and birth control. As Ace points out, the man actually thinks birth control is a matter of public policy. Precisely the opposite of what a huge majority of Americans think. Hence, Santorum is not only giving Obama a lift, he’s giving Obamacare a lift.

The rest of his record is so gung-ho Big Government that it is appalling. Seriously, here it is in detail; check it out. Yet he has managed to position himself as the anti-libertarian candidate (never mind that Ronald Reagan famously called libertarianism the heart and soul of conservatism), and this seems to have obscured the fact that other than his socially conservative positions, the man is every inch a big government RINO.  As to why the red meaters don’t care, I’m not sure. Perhaps they put social conservatism first, or perhaps they put Beat Romney first.

Beating Obama is irrelevant. These people do not mind losing.  The problem is, it won’t only be their loss.

I hate to end on such a sour note, but this is serious stuff. I don’t like to see an impending train wreck and not even say something. Still, there is one mildly amusing aspect about the train wreck, and it involves Santorum’s favorite attire, which Ace cannot ignore:

Yes, awesome, he’s an extremist on stuff I’m a moderate on but a squish RINO moderate on the things I’m an extremist on, but I should support him, because, sweater vest.

We’ve come a long way since our onetime approval of the sentiment, “I want to make Washington, DC as inconsequential to your lives as possible.”

Yes, he does wear a sweater vest. Whether it is supposed to be cute and endear him to women and the vast number of 1970s preppy wannabes, I don’t know. Reason’s Gene Healy noticed it too, in the headline:

The former senator from Pennsylvania is libertarianism’s sweater-vested arch-nemesis.

I’m thinking that the sweater vest may be intended as a prop to soften him up. Whether Rick needed to “soften” his image, I don’t know. I always thought he looked rather like a cherub, in an innocent sort of way, so I’m not sure he needed the sweater vest.

However, in a coincidence that cannot be a coincidence this morning, I noticed that former Drill Instructor R. Lee Ermey (a man whose image really did need softening) has also used the sweater vest as a prop.

At least Ermey is being deliberately funny.

Is it too late for him to enter the race? I’d love to see Santorum being sweater vest upstaged.