Presidential candidate Rick Santorum likes to claim he is conservative. Indeed, a slew of evangelical leaders endorsed him in Texas over the weekend because they said he was the most conservative candidate in the race. However, the record reveals that Santorum is in love with Big Government.
It has been well established that he wants the government in our bedrooms and monitoring our personal lives. What is less known is that he absolutely loves Big Government when it comes to money — with Santorum securing more than $1 billion in earmarks while serving as a senator from Pennsylvania. He even voted or the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” and appears to be a sleazy politician who was involved in corrosive and immoral “pay-for-play” schemes to fund his political career.
According to the New York Times:
A review of some of his earmarks, viewed alongside his political donations, suggests that the river of federal money Mr. Santorum helped direct to Pennsylvania paid off handsomely in the form of campaign cash….In all, Taxpayers for Common Sense estimated, Mr. Santorum helped secure more than $1 billion in earmarks during his Senate career, which stretched from 1995 through 2006.
….The firm’s lobbyists were well acquainted with Mr. Santorum, participating in regular breakfast meetings he hosted for lobbyists….And the lobbying firm Blank Rome, Mr. Santorum’s largest single source of contributions during the 2006 election cycle — the firm’s executives gave more than $100,000 to his campaign — had several clients who got help from Mr. Santorum with earmarks and other legislation.
Rick Santorum is a serious hypocrite. He practices big government when he invades our right to privacy, embraces big brother when he persecutes LGBT people, and is the consummate Washington Insider when it comes to earmarks.
What exactly is traditional or conservative about this pretender?
He is the most vocal about being anti gay, which is really all the evangelicals really care about most.
I have long considered myself a conservative in some ways. I think it is well for the government to pay its bills as those of us who are individuals and those who have families have to pay our bills. I have also thought that being conservative means staying out of the personal lives of others as much as possible.
But I have also considered myself liberal and progressive. It makes sense to me to guarantee universal suffrage, expand the safety net for people in need, to provide for universal health care and good education, to provide access to roads and communication, to keep infrastructure in good condition and to keep a rein on military and corporate powers so they do not infringe on the rights of the people. And it makes sense to me to incur public debt when the economy goes bad, so that people have jobs. The quicker people go back to work, the sooner they can pay taxes and the more money there is to pay the bills. I have also thought it is only fair for those who have benefitted the most from our society to contribute the most to the society from which they have benefitted.
Modern day conservatives talk a lot about paying the national debt and staying out of the lives of people. But when they have been in power, they have run the debt up high, forgetting about it till they go out of power and then they make it important again. They have also interfered more and more in the personal lives of people claiming they are conservative in the moral arena when really they use laws to try to control the personal behaviors of others. Thus a politician who touts support of marriage may divorce and remarry multiple times, or can have his private dalliances with men while decrying the evils of homosexuality. And such conservatives have done away with regulations protecting the people from corporate greed, on their claim that corporate persons need to be free to do what they will. At the same time such conservatives feed at the trough of the same greedy corporations.
In other words, modern conservatives are not conservative. Rather they use the mask of conservatism to hide their true agenda.
I think it is time to call modern conservatives what they are – greedy hypocrites. And it is time to revive true liberalism – expanding freedoms for the most people while expanding the supports and protections that people need to live and thrive.
Modern conservatives also like to invoke the name of Jesus and like to don the cloak of Christianity in their public appearances. They like to glory in their self proclaimed Judeo-Christian values. But they ignore the prophets who called greedy rich people pigs. And they ignore the example and words of Jesus who lived as a poor man, told people it was difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom, criticized the rich man who ignored Lazarus in his need, and told people that whatever they did to the least they did to him. He said people would be known by their deeds. He said when people prayed they should not toot their own horns and pray in public, but they should go into their rooms and pray in private. He said there were those who were wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing. He said nothing about same sex relationships and he told the crowd that if they were not without sin they could not stone the woman caught in adultery.
The modern day “Christian conservatives” are neither. They are hypocrites who deify greed in the name of Christianity and demonize love and compassion as socialism and communism despite the words of Jesus and the example of early Christians who shared with others in need.
Hi, John. Excellent post. I have noticed that many conservatives who are what I would coinsider true conservatives are often, surprisingly for many progressives and liberals, fiscally conservative, yet socially liberal.
I consider most of these so-called “conservatives”
to be nothing more than neo-cons. They certainly are like no conservatives that I knew in my childhood.
This just means The Santorum is a typical, normal conservative. Fiscal conservatism coming from Republican conservatives is gross hypocrisy, because they so massively pump money into the military and the intelligence agencies. In their bizarro version of the world, a billion dollars given to the military and intelligence agencies isn’t REALLY a billion dollars, or any money at all. It isn’t really even spending! So they can keep pumping the trillions down the “national security” rathole, and it’s perfectly cool, because in their own minds, they haven’t spent a thing!
Beyond that, though, there are different kinds of conservatives. Despite all the money the ultrarich have put into media and foundations and cooked studies to enforce a starve-social-services-to-death version of conservatism over all others, a fair number of conservatives think the government should be helping people, at least when they arent’ being bullied into saying otherwise by Faux News and the Heritage Foundation. I don’t consider a social conservative who thinks government should spend a little money occasionally to help real (non-rich) people any less of a conservative than all the vicious little enforcers of what’s fiscally best for the very rich. I’m not going to help the latter enforce their version of conservatism on everyone else. I don’t want to have to survive the economic horror that Mitt Romney and his extremely wealthy haters of poor and working people want to create any more than I want to be force to live through the theocratic nightmare that Rick Santorum and his Religious Right buddies want for us.