Pro Ecclesia, Pro Familia ... Pro Santorum [UPDATED]

Okay, the field has been winnowed. It's time to make a choice. There are at this point, as Patrick Archbold points out, only two choices for voters in deciding who will get the GOP nomination: Rick Santorum or Dullard Flip Rino ... errrrr ... Willard Mitt Romney.

Make no mistake - these guys are BOTH establishment candidates, as I have previously pointed out. And I come to my Santorum endorsement fairly reluctantly, after all the other conservative alternatives to Romney have fallen by the wayside one right after the other. It's not that I dislike Santorum, because I don't dislike him at all. In fact, he was, at one time, among my "favorite" politicians, not the least of which because he is a devout Catholic who shares my vision regarding the important role of the traditional family in shaping our culture and public policy. But Santorum's most-favored-statesman status came before his joining the GOP Senate leadership and his ensuing ill-fated decision to endorse the pro-abort Arlen Specter over the pro-life Pat Toomey. And we know how all that worked out, including Santorum's subsequent 20-point loss to Casey Jr. (calling into question Santorum's overall electability), and Specter's switching parties to become the 60th vote in favor of Obamacare.

Santorum's political activities since his loss have also given me pause. He is among the most hawkish at pushing the Wilsonian foreign-policy adventurism that got the last GOP administration into so much trouble. Quite frankly, although Santorum is very good on Catholic social teaching in most of his policy positions, I believe his Wilsonian foreign policy views, and what seems to be a disposition in favor of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" (even going so far as to claim that torture opponent John McCain, himself a victim of brutal torture in Vietnam's POW camps, "doesn't understand" the topic), to be clearly at odds with the teachings of the Church. That gives me great pause.

Still, the alternative is much worse. No conservative should back Mitt Romney. I find the notion unthinkable. For reasons I have exhaustively laid out on this blog and won't bother to list again here, Mitt Romney is simply an unacceptable choice for conservatives, especially social conservatives, and they should refuse to vote for him even if he wins the Republican nomination. If we'll vote for Romney, we'll have proven to the establishment that we'll just suck it up and vote for whatever RINO stiff they shove down our throats. That scenario - that the GOP powers-that-be will take social conservatives even more for granted than they already do because we'll have proven that we'll do their bidding no matter what - is an even worse-case scenario than, yes, even another 4 years of Barack Obama.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, is someone that conservatives - and especially social conservatives - can and should vote for. His lapse of judgment in supporting Specter and his troublesome Wilsonian foreign-policy and "enhanced interrogation" views are outweighed in my mind by both his steadfast and zealous advocacy of the pro-life/pro-marriage/pro-family viewpoint and the fact that he is the only acceptable conservative alternative to being stuck with Romney.

And believe me, the Romneybots are not going to take that lying down. The Romney-swooning K-Lo and the girly boys over at National Review have already started to question Santorum's conservative and small-government bona fides. [Heh. They probably never imagined when they touted Santorum as a bone to conservatives in their "Winnowing the Field" editorial that he'd actually pose a challenge to their boy.] Think about that for a moment. Sycophants of the big-government Massachusetts liberal that provided the framework for Obamacare want us to believe that Rick Santorum is the REAL big-government liberal. They won't stop there. This crowd knows how to play dirty, and they won't rest until they've torn down Santorum just like they've been working since 2008 to tear down every other conservative alternative to Romney (see, e.g., Fred Thompson, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, etc.)

So, please, conservatives, please let's all coalesce around the only conservative left standing at this point - Rick Santorum. Please, Gov. Perry and Speaker Gingrich, please drop out of the race and endorse the only conservative alternative to Mitt Romney - Rick Santorum - and put your considerable campaign warchests behind him and into scorched-earth Super-PAC ads that will make voting for Romney simply untenable for conservative and Republican voters. Because voting for Romney simply IS untenable.

Go Rick Santorum !!!


UPDATE
If you needed additional motivation to support Santorum over the establishment-backed RINO stiff, look no further. What could be a better incentive than having the intellecutally-challenged and incredibly shallow offspring of the last establishment-backed RINO stiff (who, incidentally, today endorsed the current establishment-backed RINO stiff) predicting "bedlam and hysteria like you've never seen" if Santorum wins the nomination.

LOL. What a dumbass.