Paging Nehemiah Scudder...

Not that I disagree with what Santorum is saying, but hearing a nanny-state, big government "conservative" say that there is no separation of church and state gives me the willies.

"Ye shall know them by their fruits."  Everyone is shaped by the beliefs at the bottom of their souls.  You cannot separate religion from politics--the founding fathers wanted to keep politics from forcing certain doctrines and dogmas on all.  Remember: first lines of the first amendment are "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

What scares the bejesus out of me is I could see sanctimonius Santorum breaking that part of it--specifically, the establishment clause--without pausing to consider the betrayal of the office, because it's in the people's best interest.

The only commodity any politician has to offer is jawbone. His personal integrity--meaning, if he gives his word, can you rely on it? A successful business politician knows this and guards his reputation for sticking by his commitments--because he wants to stay in business--go on stealing, that is--not only this week but next year and years after that. so if he's smart enough to be successful at this very exacting trade, he can have the morals of a snapping turtle, but he performs in such a way as not to jeopardize the only thing he has to sell, his reputation for keeping promises.

"But a reform politician has no such lodestone. His devotion is to the welfare of all the people--an abstraction of very high order and therefore capable of endless definition...In consequence your utterly sincere and incorruptible reform politician is capable of breaking his word three times before breakfast--not from personal dishonesty, as he sincerely regrets the necessity and will tell you so--but from unswerving devotion to his ideal.

All it takes to get him to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul.

--Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

And Santorum strikes me as a big-government reform politician.  Frankly, so do they all.  That's why I plan to write in a candidate who dropped out of the race early (see on the right, second section down).

Seriously--can we make it a new rule that, before people are permitted to run for national office that they must read Heinlein's Future History, most of Orwell's work, and maybe a few of the old sci-fi greats warning about messing with sentient computers and/or extinct animal and/or the human genome?  And that they must write for widespread publication, their thoughts on what they've read?  Or is it too much to ask that we expect our politicians to think critically, and apply if/then possibly reasoning to their ideas?