This piece from Peter at Right Wing Watch, describing Rick Santorum’s weekend, is just bizarre on so many levels:
Santorum reprised those remarks on Saturday night at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, with some additional Tea-infused red meat: Government entitlement programs are the equivalent of a schoolyard pusher getting kids hooked on drugs. If “Obamacare” is not repealed, America will cease to be America. It will be <shudder> France.
Denouncing Kennedy was not Santorum’s only noteworthy line of attack. He also took on Americans of the World War II generation, describing how the “greatest generation” stayed out of the war while Europe fell and Britain was bombed, while the Pacific Rim fell to Japan, and turned back a boatload of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. That generation was only great once it was awakened by Pearl Harbor, said Santorum. This generation, he said, has an even tougher job (!). Waking up Americans is this generation’s Pearl Harbor moment, he told his audience, and you are Paul Revere. It’s a seriously mixed metaphor, but everyone knew what he meant. They have to drop everything to save America between now and 2012.
My favorite history lesson has always been the one when Paul Revere rode a dinghy through the Pacific Ocean and warned of the impending Japanese bomb. It always bring a single tear to my eye.
It is so sad that there is a segment of the American electorate, in this supposed “greatest country ever,” which is so intellectually deprived that grotesquely mixed metaphors like the one above not only works on them, but motivates them.
