Rick Santorum's new gig--columnist for the Philly Inky--response from the Philly Daily News...

"...odd was one of the nicer terms used in The Inquirer to describe me. Imagine these words next to your name in your high school yearbook - disingenuous, snake oil peddler, smug, arrogant, chicken-livered, intolerant and fatalistic.”

“My new employer also claimed not so long ago that I ‘inspire contempt’ and ‘have lost my mind’ and that my actions bore a remarkable resemblance to Joe McCarthy's. You know? The namesake of McCarthyism. At the time, I took solace from the implied compliment. (LM: Think about that sentence for a moment—a McCarthy comparison is an implied compliment?) At least The Inquirer thought I was making a substantial mark on my generation. Not bad for someone they also called a ‘doofus.’”

“As regular readers of this page know, these pejoratives only scratched the surface of the contempt that this paper - and its readers, in what seemed to me an endless stream of letters to the editor - had for me and my performance in office.” <snip> Thank you, Inquirer, for…inviting this elephant into your living room.”

New Attytood biweekly column to deal with growing problem of elephants in your room Santorum

As you may have already seen, the Inquirer's new Northern Virginia correspondent--op-ed columnist--showed up for work today to begin his biweekly gig. Amazingly, scouring the globe for new enemies for America to hate isn't a full-time job, and so comes now former Sen. Rick Santorum with his Philadelphia Inquirer writing gig aimed at showing the lighter side of anti-Islamo-Fascism crusaders, called "The Elephant in the Room."

Apparently, elephants have even thinner skin than we realized! The bulk of Santorum's first column isn't so much a statement of Republican principles -- as you might expect from the title -- but the braying of a wounded pachyderm:

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Hopefully, Santorum's first column will be the last one that's "all about ME," and future ones will deal more with his conservative ideas and values. Look, the reality is that a lot of people were disappointed and upset when the new owners of the Inquirer (who also own the Daily News where I work) decided to give the ousted ex-senator (with a meager 41 percent of the vote, and even worse in the Philadelphia region) such a coveted op-ed platform.

Not me. I say, "Bring it on!" I actually think more sunlight on the actual views of Santorum and his ilk will be healthy for the American debate...because sunlight is the best disinfectant. No, the real problem with the hiring of Rick Santorum wasn't the actual hiring of Rick Santorum but the failure to balance his arrival with any new progressive voices. But no problem. The Internet is here to help us create that kind of balance that wasn't so easy in the time of Guttenberg.

Thus, my announcement of a new column here at Attytood, which will appear every two weeks and will address and, for the most part rebut (except, like, if writes to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, or whine about his traffic problems down in Loudon County), what Santorum has to say in his new pricey hunk of newspaper real estate. I'd hoped to launch this new column today with a clever name, but -- to be brutally honest -- I haven't been able to come up with the perfect one, not yet.

So consider this a "crowdsourcing" project: You, the reader, will help me come up with a name for this un-Santorum column. (A play on the "Elephants" theme would be nice.) I'll post the winner and come back with a more official announcement between now and the next Santorum column, which is actually slated for, um, Turkey Day, if I'm not mistaken.

As for today, other than the fact that it's hard to disagree in opposing name-calling, Santorum hasn't provided a lot of fodder to work with here. This is his stray, not-very-well-aimed ideological potshot:

I readily admit that most of the readers of The Inquirer may not be big fans of conservative ideas. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't have the opportunity to consider them. It's an unfortunate fact that over the last decades, the institutional left - Hollywood, the mainstream media and academia - have not only become intolerant of dissent from their own orthodoxies, but also often attack anyone who espouses an opposing view.

I had the honor of speaking at Penn, Temple and Penn State last month. When I asked conservative student organizers at each school about the support they receive from the faculty, they all had the same response: laughter.

Interesting that Santorum didn't feel like sharing with his new Inquirer readers the reason that he had the "honor" of speaking at these campuses, which as regular readers here know well, was a thing called Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, at which the "honorees" also included the likes of famed "Jew-perfecter" Ann Coulter, whom to my knowledge has not been denounced by Santorum for her highly offensive remarks.

And there really was no "honor" at all -- that would be something like the faculty or administration deciding to confer an honorory degree, something that's a lot less likely now that you have zero political power. In fact, the organizer of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, David Horowitz, in many cases used trickery and misrepresentation in an effort to get speakers like you a gig on these campuses.

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