If Ross Douthat is any kind of bellwether, Santorum’s candidacy for the GOP nomination is in trouble. Douthat shares Santorum’s communitarian and social conservative instincts, but now even Douthat sees Santorum as too hot-headed and undisciplined to win in November. He writes, In the (still-unlikely) event that Santorum captured the nomination, then, his campaign would probably be to social conservatism what Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign was to small-government conservatism: A losing effort that would inspire countless observers to declare the loser’s worldview discredited, rejected, finished. In the longer run, a Santorum candidacy might suggest a path that a more electable pro-life populist could follow, much as Reagan ultimately followed Goldwater.…
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Joe Scarborough’s Rant against Rick Santorum
Joe Scarborough tells candidate Rick Santorum to shut-up about “the stupid side issues” saying, If you want to debate those issues, let’s have a Bible study…but if you’re running for the President of the United States, talk about how you’re going to reform the tax system, how you’re gonna save entitlements, and how you’re going to bring jobs back to America. And if you can’t be focused enough to do that, go home!”
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Hunting Bambi
The inimitable Mark Coppenger on the HHS mandate: I once heard Frederica Mathewes-Green say that every child born after 1973 was a “survivor.” That was the year that Roe v. Wade declared “open season” on the contents of the womb. But it appears the license to hunt Bambi was not enough. Now the government is making sure you have a rifle. Read the rest here.
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Sex, Lies, and Rick Santorum
Bill McGurn’s column in WSJ knocks it out of the park. He hammers one of the most glaring double standards in politics: When Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008, he declared that marriage is between a man and a woman. For the most part, his position was treated as a nonissue. Now Rick Santorum is campaigning for president. He too says that marriage is between a man and a woman. What a different reaction he gets. There’s no mystery why. Mr. Santorum is attacked because everyone understands that he means what he says. President Obama, by contrast, gets a pass because everyone understands—nudge nudge, wink wink—that he’s not…
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Swallowing the Feminist Narrative Hook, Line, and Sinker
How many of you saw the news last week about outraged congresswomen who stormed out of the congressional hearing on the contraceptive mandate? I did. I also saw Nancy Pelosi and a host of others angrily denouncing the fact that there were no women represented on the panel. So they decried the panel as a sham and as a threat to women’s rights. Essentially, they were saying this: This hubbub about the HHR mandate is just a bunch of men trying to deprive women of their contraceptives. Women beware! They’re coming for your contraceptives too! Nevermind that the claim was untrue. These pro-choice politicians found willing partners in the mainstream…
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Bill Clinton Documentary Airs Tonight on PBS
PBS’s “American Experience” will be airing a biopic on former President William Jefferson Clinton. It is four hours long. Part 1 airs tonight at 9pm ET, and part 2 tomorrow night (February 20-21). You can watch the trailer below, and here’s the description from PBS’s website:
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Pat Buchanan Explains His Ouster from MSNBC
The bottom line is this. Buchanan wrote a book, and liberal groups accused him of racism. The president of MSNBC subsequently said that he didn’t think Buchanan’s book “should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” So they cut him loose. Read the rest here.
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Scholars and Leaders Line-up to Protest Mandate
The statement below was put out by the Beckett Fund, and it says that President Obama did not “accommodate” religious liberty concerns in his recent “compromise.” The healthcare law still requires religious groups to pay for chemical abortions and contraception. I want you to notice the names on this list. It is signed by 160 scholars and leaders, and signatories include D. A. Carson, Albert Mohler, Robbie George, Russell Moore, Danny Akin, David Dockery, and many others.
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There Went Religious Liberty…
Albert Mohler takes a hard-hitting look at Nicholas Kristof’s cavalier dismissal of religious liberty in the wake of the new healthcare mandate. Mohler’s critique is important because Kristof’s column is emblematic of a sentiment that has become quite common among the American left. For them, religious liberty is no longer an inalienable right, but something that can be abridged when it comes into conflict with the secular state. Neither Kristof nor any other American liberal I know of supports throwing Christians to the lions (yet), but they are laying the intellectual and legal ground for it whether they realize it or not. That is why the President’s healthcare mandate deserves…
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Albert Mohler Hits Hard on the President’s “Compromise”
Albert Mohler has a must-read article on the unacceptability of President Obama’s so-called “compromise.” He concludes: Only an accounting maneuver hides the fact that we will all be paying for chemical abortions under the President’s prized Affordable Care Act. Added to this is coverage for sterilizations… Anyone who celebrates this “compromise” as a victory is hiding behind an accounting trick. That accounting trick cannot hide the great moral tragedy at the heart of the President’s policy — a policy that leaves religious liberty in peril and Planned Parenthood smiling. This is an important explanation of what happened today, and you need to read the whole thing.