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" William McGurn, writing in the Wall Street Journal Bob Bartley Memorial Nervous Ward today, pronounces himself stunned by the ability of Rick Santorum to mobilize a specific subset of Bedlamites in the Republican base to the point where he is clearly the first runner-up to Willard Romney, and if the winner for any reason is unable to carry on with his duties as Mr. Republican, the first runner-up will be asked to step in for him, despite the fact that the first runner-up is a colossal dick, and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is? For McGurn, however, all that is secondary to the fact that Santorum has struck a blow for Liberty (!) and for the control of the ladyparts by those best capable of evaluating what the proper use of the ladyparts in society is \u2014 namely, Republican politicians and celibate males in beanies and carpet slippers. To wit: Mr. Santorum knows better than his critics where that leads. It leads to unilateral surrender-and the imposition of morality. This is the morality that is imposed on the nation when, say, a court discovers a right to same-sex marriage or a Health and Human Services Secretary decrees that henceforth all religious institutions, no matter what their teachings, will be forced to underwrite her morality. Actually, their insurance companies will have to do so and, the last time I checked, insurance companies were not religious institutions, except possibly in Connecticut. On he goes... Yet speak he does. The result is that he is today the only serious rival to Mr. Romney. That he is where he is, despite his baggage, is more than the latest manifestation of Anyone But Romney. It suggests that a sizable part of America hungers for a leader willing to address the connection between human freedom and larger truths, difficult as that can be. The press would have us believe that these are zealots itching to make contraception illegal. In reality, they are folks who understand that the combination of expanding government and a permissive society is, in the long run, as lethal to the American Dream as bad economic policy. It takes a rather unique grasp of American history to equate the relative lethality to &amp;quot;the American Dream&amp;quot; of the invention of the pill and the promulgation of the notion that women can be independent actors in their sexual lives to that of, say, the Great Depression and the Panic of 1873. And we also here have a rather flexible notion of what constitutes &amp;quot;a sizable part of America&amp;quot; and precisely what it &amp;quot;hungers&amp;quot; for. The fact that Rick Santorum has been able to gin up enough sex-obsessed Pecksniffs to stay (barely) alive in a race in which all the fallen candidates were either incompetents like Rick Perry, abject public loons like Michele Bachmann, career &amp;#039;hounds like Herman Cain, or walking dead men like Newt Gingrich, says everything about that party and nothing about what anybody &amp;quot;hungers for.&amp;quot; If you want to see how brilliantly Santorum&amp;#039;s principled stand on the important ladyparts issues is playing with the public, take a look at what happened yesterday in Illinois, where it has outraged the good Republican suburban women who want to have the sexy sexytime with their good Republican husbands without having to be concerned about having any more good Republican children as a consequence. Rick Santorum has fled to the last refuge of the colossal dick \u2014 blaming the media for reporting what it is he said. (And I am assuming that &amp;quot;trying to pigeonhole you&amp;quot; is not a euphemism in this case, but who can really say?) And the Romneybot 2.0 nearly blew a gasket on the topic, resorting to its basic Loud Gibberish function and saying, &amp;quot;If you want free stuff vote for the other guy,&amp;quot; before smoke began to come out of its eyes and small gears fell from its ears. The Romneybot is probably going to win fairly big in Illinois tonight. The shoeless gomer factor is pretty low there, even downstate, and there seem to be enough sensible Republicans there to notice that, really, this Republican party nominating process has reached the B.J. Hunnicutt Stage of its run. None of the jokes are funny any more. It&amp;#039;s been on television far too long for its own good. The problem that the Republicans have, of course, is that there is nobody in the party with the authority to pull the plug. All these stories about how &amp;quot;someone&amp;quot; is going to have to tell Newt Gingrich that it&amp;#039;s time to go back to the lecture circuit are hilarious. At what point in his political career has anybody been able to tell the Definer Of Civilization&amp;#039;s Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces anything? Santorum will continue as long as he has the money, and as long as there&amp;#039;s a market for one anti-Romney, which will be until the year 2525, if current trends continue. The Republican National Committee designed a madhouse of a nominating process and then completely lost control of it. And the presumed nominee, and presumptive leader of the party, is deeply distrusted by the party he is presumed to lead. The basic problem with Republican politics this year \u2014 and it is one unique in my experience \u2014 is that there simply is nobody in charge of it. Nobody&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;fighting over the wheel&amp;quot; because a bunch of nutty folks from steerage took control of the ship in 2010 and threw the wheel overboard. &amp;quot;A sizable number&amp;quot; of Americans are catching on to this basic fact. Illinois could be the first sign that the Republicans intend to do anything about that. Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13302/illinois-primary-preview-7480108/>