The real Santorum is a frothy mixture of self-interest, loose ethical standards & devotion to the 1%
The Rick Santorum that America doesn't know
................................
.......Santorum’s weird sexual bluster can obscure who he really is, and what truly matters about his suddenly surging campaign. As a Philadelphia-based political reporter, I arrived in town just seven months after Santorum became my state’s junior senator. I followed his 12 years on the Washington political stage closely, and I think people obsessing on the “man-on-dog” stuff are missing the bigger picture. For one thing, the self-styled “family values” expert has a surprisingly ambiguous record with his own personal ethics. Also, Santorum’s legislative record shows that his real workaday agenda was not so much waging culture wars as protecting the interests of the 1 Percent, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the modern Republican Party. You could say that Rick Santorum is just another politician. But that would be giving him too much credit.
Here’s a Pennsylvanian’s brief guide to the Rick Santorum you don’t know:
(Check this xlnt summary out
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/The-Santorum-that-America-doesnt-know.html?cmpid=125219969
1. This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum’s political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity’s money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum’s finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum’s charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity – which didn’t register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.
.......................
7. The defender of family values was also slavish in his devotion to a large American corporate behemoth, Wal-Mart: In the wake of the report about Santorum's travel in the Wal-Mart corporate jet, I counted the many ways that Santorum had done the bidding of the world's largest retailer in the Senate, including battling to limit any increases in the minimum wage and seeking to make changes in overtime rules that woulld benefit the company and hurt its blue-collar workforce, tort reform to limit lawsuits against what is said to be the world's most-sued company, and changes in charitable giving laws and of course eliminating the estate tax that would benefit the billionaire heirs of Sam Walton.
....................
The real Rick Santorum is indeed a frothy mixture -- of self-interest, loose ethical standards, and careerism in a career that's been largely devoted not so much to the social causes about which he makes headlines as looking out for the interests of big corporations and the wealthiest 1 Percent of Americans. It's a shame that more voters don't know that yet. That is the "Google problem" that Santorum actually deserves.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/The-Santorum-that-America-doesnt-know.html?cmpid=125219969
