And, Indeed, Doesn’t This GOP Primary Field Make You Want to Barf?
After a nut-related event last night, I would prefer not to think about “throwing up” for a while. But, alas, I saw Little Ricky’s pensees on the subject of religious freedom anyway, so:
Former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) on Sunday defended a statement he made last October in which he said that he “almost threw up” when he read John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Houston address on the role of religion in public life.
[...]
In the speech, Kennedy addressed the concerns of Protestant ministers who doubted whether he would make decisions as president independent of his Catholic faith.
So, if I understand in 1960, the GOP was upset because they (erroneously) believed that a Roman Catholic president would not govern for all Americans but would take orders directly from a religious hierarchy. In 2012, Republicans are furious because a president would try to govern for all Americans rather than taking orders directly from a religious hierarchy.
UPDATE: Great point by Digby:
I don’t think Ricky understands his history very well. Evidently, he was unaware that in 1960, conservatives thought of Catholics the same way think of Muslims today. He seems under the impression that America was a wonderful religiously tolerant nation until the horrible secularists came along and ruined everything.
Is it fair to say that the talk of Kennedy’s Catholicism was hypocritical at the time? If memory serves, it had been six years since the enshrinement of IN GOD WE TRUST — that is, we were skating fairly close to the establishment of nondenominational Protestantism anyway. Is it possible that anyone at the time literally believed there was less ideological conformism, in 1960, on the “northern” side of the confessional divide?
I suppose it’s conceivable someone believed that organic ideological conformity was better than one with a nominal hierarchy. But Occam would suggest a simpler answer.
That they believed that razor blade-based ideological conformity was better than one with a nominal hierarchy?
Was I opaque? I believe Occam here suggests that people pretended to worry about Kennedy taking orders from Rome because they just didn’t like Catholics.
Sure, Vance, next you’ll try to tell us that people say this girl shouldn’t be Miss USA because they don’t like Muslims, rather than because she’s clearly unfit for the job.
But Occam would suggest a simpler answer.
Well yes, but Occam was himself a Papist, and therefore not to be trusted. He just wants you to think that the simplest explanation is best.
How on earth would this result from Catholicism?
I wonder what Occam would have been like if he were Jewish? We Jews take positive delight in very complex explanations.
It’s a mystery. Shut up.
Rabid anti-Catholicism was still alive and well in this country at the time and the conservative Protestant denominations had not yet become heavily politicized (another gift from St. Ronnie that just keeps on giving).
I was only fifteen at the time, but from memory, it seemed something that JFK had to do.
I was actually a bit younger, but that is my understanding as well.
Actually the conservative Protestant denominations became heavily politicized in the 1970s (school prayer, sex ed, and abortion were the key issues). Reagan just took advantage of this in 1980.
And their first major electoral mobilization was the Carter campaign in 1976.
Indeed, and the fundamentalist Protestants didn’t really go full metal wingnut on abortion until pretty late in the 1970′s, and that was largely due to the confluence of Francis Schaeffer’s sudden popularity and Jerry Falwell’s hunger for greater temporal power. Hell, there were conservative Southern Baptist theologians who initially praised Roe v. Wade, until they were brought around by the realization that making common cause with the heathen graven-image-worshipping Papists could increase their political influence. Whereupon they used their newfound muscle to elect an unchurched divorced previously pro-choice governor of California whose wife was an astrology enthusiast, and the rest is history.
I was going to add, “… in preference to a fairly conservative Sunday School teacher from Georgia whom they had previously supported,” but the sentence was already unwieldy.
The Knights of Columbus — good Catholics all — were the ones driving the “In God We Trust” bus.
A good time for showy anti-Communism and ‘See, we are so real Americans’ Americanism by Catholics. (Those were the days of Cardinal Mindszenty, Poland and Lithuania under the Stalinist boot, Captive Nations week, etc,)
I did not know that — thanks.
Also, glad our host got through his nut-related event OK.
Can a guy guy even get a good pair of Stalinist Boots anymore?
I’m having to make do with these Enver Hoxha sneakers…
Any American academic should be able to hook you up.
And the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance was apparently at the suggestion of Cardinal Spellman.
The Knights in CT were the ones pushing for the enforcement of laws against contraception which all came to a head in the Griswald case. Griswald eventuall helped law the foundation for the Roe decision. Consequently, in an ironic twist, the Knight of Columbus helped to legalize abortion.
“eventually helped to lay” should be
You go and wash your mouth, young man!
Rick Santorum has really been turning the crazy up to eleven.
I’d like to think that his statements over the past couple of weeks will make him unacceptable to even Republican voters, but it doesn’t seem to be working that way.
The Republican Party has really become quite a remarkable organization.
And I mean that in a bad way.
We have here an incredibly extremist, right wing candidate. And the only way that Romney can viably attack him is from the right. Romney’s attacks on this insane theocratic madman are that he’s too liberal.
This is madness. It has become literally impossible for a Republican candidate to be too right wing for the electorate.
Franco was supported by the Catholic Church, and he supported them in return. It’s unsurprising that the radically reactionary party are [maybe-quasi-] theocrats.
Oh, there’s a strong history of right-wing politics and Catholicism in the US as well–the Sovereign Military Order of Malta numbered among its members many OSS and CIA notables, and had Jeane Kirkpatrick in its women’s branch. Even as Maryknoll nuns were being butchered in El Salvador, Dominican priests were helping run the World Anti-Communist League.
While the current situation is efflorescent, it’s not without roots.
10 points for best metaphor of the week
Why can’t we get nice, leftisit Catholic clergy like the have in Latin American countries like Brazil?
We do.
They’re called nuns. Some of the most hard-assed radicals you’ll ever meet.
I guess what is surprising is that the Republican Party has basically become a uniformly “radically reactionary party”, to the point where any kind of criticism of party extremism from the center is off limits. That’s a relatively recent development. Remember that in 2000, Bush and McCain were basically competing with one another to seem more centrist.
The existence of Santorum isn’t surprising at all. It’s that a putatively sane, establishment candidate like Romney has decided that the only way he can attack Santorum is from the right, for not being conservative enough.
Ford and Bush didn’t attack Reagan from the right. Humphrey and Muskie didn’t attack McGovern from the left (and McGovern would actually have been genuinely vulnerable to being accused of not being left wing enough). This is a genuinely weird situation.
Some of that was Rove, unlike the wingnuts he had/has no delusions that the way to win in the GENERAL elections is by being more conservative.
The funny thing is that the hardcore right wingnuts are no longer even pretending to listen to him… pity
If you want consistency from conservatives, you are living in the wrong country. Also reflects the dramatic realignment of the Republican Party over the past 50 years.
Conservatives in the U.S. are consistent. They’re consistently tribal to the point of ideological incoherency. They’re consistent in their rejection of the concept of empirical reality. Their brains have the consistent consistency of mush.
Conservatism in the U.S. simply isn’t an ideology at all anymore. It’s sociopathy masquerading as tribalism masquerading as incoherent ideology, and at that it’s quite consistent.
Tha’s pretty entertaining stuff. It’s the blind man describing the elephant.
How confused you seem.
Yeah, well what’s really “entertaining” is how you can’t even begin to defend today’s right-wing batshittery in any remotely rational/coherent way so you just resort to vague, meaningless imprecations.
Either that or its an experiment in living postmodernism created by some grad student for her PhD thesis.
Kennedy’s spinning in his grave so fast, he’d throw-up too, if he’d had anything to eat or drink in 48+ years.
“Savanarola” Santorum needs to be put into a sanitarium – or join Opus Dei – or whatever the name is of the even more extreme group in the Catholic Church.
I prefer “Senator Torquemada”, myself, although now that I think about, Savonarola may work better.
I used to call him that, too. But I do think “Savonarola” works better.
And that’s not original – I just wish I could remember where I’d heard that first.
And Rick – if you’re to the right of Pope Rat-faced-zinger, maybe, as the Catholic Church moves to the right, you’d be better off positioning yourself to be the next Pope.
Pope Uber-Pious I.
I think (but I’m not at all sure) that I may have coined “Senator Savonarola” either on TNC’s Atlantic blog or at Balloon Juice.
Senator Rectum Sanctorum.
+1
It also has that old timey Latin Mass sound to it
rectum santorum frothi mictum.
Please, “sanctorum”.
I used to call him Senator Sanctimoron, but now I prefer Frothy Mixture.
Did you efgoldman, then this guy is stealing your material.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/24/watch-gps-brzezinski-embarrassed-as-an-american-by-gop-candidates/
“If this is anyone but
Steve AllenZbigniew Brzezinski, you’re stealing my bit.”Nice “Simpsons” reference!
No, Torquemada works better. Savonarola cared about the material well beign of the poor.
Larison had a post up the other day commenting that comparing Santorum to Savonarola is unfair to Savonarola:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/2012/02/22/abusing-the-poor-friar-ii/
I am quite the Larison fan, but I wouldn’t trust his judgment on anything concerning medieval fanaticism.
He probably thinks the squish and sell out santorum is nothing like the principled Savonarola.
[...] Scott Lemieux: So, if I understand in 1960, the GOP was upset because they (erroneously) believed that a Roman Catholic president would not govern for all Americans but would take orders directly from a religious hierarchy. In 2012, Republicans are furious because a president would try to govern for all Americans rather than taking orders directly from a religious hierarchy. Tweet Spotlight No Comments [...]
Perhaps it was the ‘nut-related incident’ that did it, but I initially read ‘little Ricky’s pensees’ as ‘little Ricky’s penises’ and I was about to feel very very sorry for you.
I can’t decide if I love the idea of little Ricky as nominee, and the inevitable enormous humiliating loss (I hope), or hate the thought of having to see his slimy smirking visage throughout the rest of the campaign season as he assures news reader after news reader how God is obviously on his side.
Is it just me, or does Santorum look and sound eerily like Tommy Carcetti?
Just you.
he looks a bit like Chevy Chase to me. Perhaps you whippersnappers here won’t know who I mean…
Depending on the angle, Andy Kaufman, too.
Oh I definitely see that.
When I first read ‘nut-related incident’, I thought he had made the mistake of watching one of the GOP debates.
Uh oh!
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/world-news-political-insights-what-mitt-romney-has-already-lost/
I want the popcorn concession.
If the Republicans keep up their stupid “community organizer” “soft on terrorism” attacks on Obama that they have been previewing it doesn’t matter who they run.
There hasn’t been a dark horse since Willkie, right?
`
Not that any democrat should fear a repeat of 1940.
Uh-oh #2. D’you suppose anybody in the MSM has the cojones to ask Senator Savonarola about this (from his home state, after all):
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/court-filing-bevilacqua-ordered-shredding-of-memo-identifying-suspected-abusers-1.3559293
Sure, as soon as they’ve cleaned up that mystery about sinking the Maine
Oops. There went the senior citizen Catholic vote. Growing up devout Catholics of the Irish persuasion often had pictures of the Pope and JFK in a matched pair on the wall. Some old school Irish restaurants in Boston still do.
I can hear the … Santorum, didn’t realize that was Italian, explains a lot …. going on in many minds. The older generation of Catholics were very ethnically divided. That’s why Boston and other cities have so many churches they need to close down. Every ethnic group would have it’s own church. So a town would have an Irish parish, an Italian parish, and if they were large a Polish or French Canadian parish as well. Vatican II was supposed to do away with that, but Ricky hates on Vatican II….
Cole quoted this bit from the JFK speech:
Realize that today’s Republicans find that perfect expression of quintessential American values to be the moral equivalent of Godless Communism. There’s your nausea.
If we were to update that speech to today’s reality it would probably include “a Mormon,” as Mittens is finding out to his dismay.