Santorum brought home stillborn child...bat**** crazy alert.

[Skybird]

"Frist, Lott and McConnell are not as passionate as Rick Santorum," says Sen. Arlen Specter, Santorum's fellow Republican from Pennsylvania. "He takes on more issues that have an emotional component."

A lot of people do, but Santorum creates and attracts more heat. It might be the pride he takes in his agitator's role. Or, simply, that he's an up-and-comer who knows he's an up-and-comer.

(...)

In conversations, Santorum tends to use out-of-favor terms, then correct himself in a way that calls attention to the infraction ("stewardess, or flight attendant, I should say"). "I'm supposed to go to a dinner at the American Indian museum," he says later. "Sorry, the Native American museum. I always mess that up."

Have not seen much of him over here, but what I saw, immediately gave me the imrpession of a person who is calculating how to stage-act best. That is not only not authetic behaviour then, but also means a person that is manipulative and does not reveal to you its real intention. Other parts of the WP story also give me the impression of him doing a lot of stage-acting only.

On the baby issue, I weigh the natural healthiness of doing mourning by a clear mind that allows the sadness being felt, against religious extremism and and the nut mindset of militant irrationalism that the abortion debate accompanies much stronger in the US than here in Europe. Santorum's stillborn maybe was beyond the developement phase before which you may even have problems to recognise that drop of gallert you hold on hour fingertip as something human at all, with 20 weeks, you can recognise a fetus as a human body indeed, and not just symbolically. I will not criticise him on his decision to take the dead body home, therefore. Critical I am of attempts to call every unspecific bunch of cellular mass as a "human" with a personality, a mind, emotions, perceptions, etc etc. . There is too much irrationality in the debate. And much of it comes as a varied consequence from that religious crazy idea of "be fruitful and multiply", man made by the image of a deity (which would be no compliment to the deity then...) and that man shall rule all life and see himself as the crown of creation. Such beliefs of course cause emotional sentiments that are not amongst the most modest there are. In this case, as said I will not criticise Santorum for his decision.

But I question his motives, both regarding the media and the public, and his living children.

To me, Santorum comes across as a great and unscrupulous manipulator, and a blender.