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" TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Well, he got around to saying that they should all vote for Willard Romney and Paul Ryan, and he did it right there in public with everybody watching, but not before Rick Santorum gave the hall a shot of culture war that it had been lacking, what with all the paeans to how we built it ourselves, with no help from the government at all. He spent a while talking about his coal-miner grandfather \u2014 &amp;quot;He came on a ship called Providence. How providential!&amp;quot; Gawd. &amp;quot;In 1923, there were no government benefits for citizens, except one \u2014 freedom!&amp;quot; he said. Tough break, Grandpa, you shoulda been here in the 1890&amp;#039;s. Breaker boys. Factory girls. Silicosis. Now, that was freedom, boy. That&amp;#039;s what the Founders had in mind. Rick Santorum: the last real relic of the Gilded Age. But he didn&amp;#039;t really get rolling until he started talking about the president and welfare, because that&amp;#039;s where all of his wheelhouses converge into a single giant mall of pure mendacious twaddle. &amp;quot;This summer he showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare,&amp;quot; Santorum said of President Obama. &amp;quot;I helped write welfare reform, and we made the law crystal-clear: No president can waive the work requirement. But as with his refusal to enforce our immigration laws, President Obama rules like he is above the law. Americans, take heed. When a president can simply give a speech, or write a memo, and change the law to do what the law says it cannot do. The United States will no longer be a Republic.&amp;quot; The obvious lie about what the president has done with welfare reform aside \u2014 and it&amp;#039;s been debunked more than the Loch Ness Monster at this point \u2014 this is gamey, rancid stuff, one tiny baby step away from the ways militias talk, and almost nobody in this hall noticed it. And it struck me \u2014 as he went on about the &amp;quot;hands&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;d shaken, including the &amp;quot;broken ones&amp;quot; of special-needs children, whom he implied that the Democrats would have preferred to have been murdered at birth, which really go the biggest cheer of the night so far \u2014 that it had been a while since I mentioned what a colossal dick Rick Santorum, with all his wet-eyed piety, really is. FOLLOW MORE LIVE COVERAGE FROM TAMPA ALL WEEK LONG RIGHT HERE AND WITH @ESQPOLITICS ON TWITTER &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15549/rick-santorum-rnc-speech-12158296/>