Oy, Gotta Wipe This Santorum Off My Shoes

[filkertom]

bayushisan alerted me to one-time, and apparently one-more-time, presidential hopeful Rick Santorum putting his foot in his mouth again:

In an interview with a New Hampshire radio station Tuesday, Rick Santorum suggested the nation's "abortion culture" is to blame for the Social Security program's financial problems.

Per The Hill's Shane D'Aprile, the former Pennsylvania senator and 2012 presidential hopeful told WEZS Radio that not enough children are being born to support the troubled entitlement system in part because of the rising number of abortions.

"The Social Security system, in my opinion, is a flawed design, period. But having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends," Santorum said. "We don't have enough workers to support the retirees . . . . A third of the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion."

Santorum was responding to a caller, who suggested abortion was behind the nation's troubled Social Security and Medicare infrastructure. Per The Hill, the former senator said the caller was "absolutely right."

"We have seven children, so we're doing our part to fund the Social Security system," Santorum added.

What struck me about this was not the utter insanity of it -- people pay for their own SocSec benefits but we don't have enough people doing it because abortions are just the most fun thing to do on the weekend so there aren't enough benefits for the people who aren't aborted, or somethin' -- but, surprisingly to me at least, the comments.

See, Yahoo comment pages tend to be a real cesspool. Nasty, profane, racist, ever-damn-thing but readable. But, on this issue, it appears that Santorum is a uniter, not a divider: A whole lot of the comments have nailed the economic truth about Social Security -- it would be just fine if Congress didn't keep borrowing from it, if we weren't financing two-and-a-half wars off the books, if we actually had enough jobs for all the unemployed so they could pay into SocSec.

It was quite encouraging. Over the past few months, there have been things -- the governors' situation in Wisconsin and Ohio and Michigan and Florida, the ravings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the complete and utter lack of any advancement on the job front by the Republican-controlled House despite them campaigning pretty much exclusively on job creation last year -- that have actually begun to catch the attention of a majority of people. And they do not like what they see.

Maybe... just maybe... America is beginning to wake up.