Jesus Isn't Running

My friend Marlene, in defense of Santorum, recently said, " That's why character is so important. We need men of character in Washington DC instead of arrogant, power-hungry, egotistical maniacs who care only about themselves. But men of character are scarce these days, not because government got corrupted, but because society got corrupted. In other words, we have to fix our society before we'll ever fix our government,"

As to the first part of her assertion, she errs in massively understating the solution. We don't simply need men of character. We need men of perfect character who walk perfectly according to their infallible conscience at at all times to the utmost. We need Jesus. And not just Jesus, but thousands of Jesus' filling every office great and small in Washington. If we approach the problem as a character deficiency, the solution is impossible to attain and does not anywhere present itself to us in time or space.

There simply isn't a man with broad enough shoulders to stay the crush of this massively bloated secular-socialist machine in Washington. A man does not have the character to stop a tsunami, neither does he have the character to stop Washington.

And here the the un-frickin-believable genius of our founding fathers reveals itself to us. Our magnificent document of governance was created, in large part by men who were architects and inventors and who understood the functions of machinery, to run perpetually and indefinitely by imperfect men. The checks and balances of power between the three branches of government as assembled by our founding fathers perfectly inoculated the citizens against abuse by well meaning individuals and ne'er-do-wells, alike.

Our Constitution was written with the assumption that sinners would be governing her people. We don't need better men in office. We need a return to the Constitution.

Only one man in this race is speaking about restoring the balance of powers as enumerated in the Constitution, and that is Newt.

My problem with Santorum is not just that he voted to raise the debt ceiling five times while in the Senate.

It's not only that he requested billions of dollars in pork projects for Pennsylvania while he was in office and that "A review of some of his earmarks, viewed alongside his political donations, suggests that the river of federal money Mr. Santorum helped direct to Pennsylvania paid off handsomely in the form of campaign cash.” (Michael Luo and Mike McIntire, The New York Times, 1/15/12).

It's not even that he voted 51 times to increase spending in a single session and not one time - that would be a big, fat ZERO - to cut spending, or that he twice voted for the "Bridge To Nowhere". And defended it!

No, my problem is that he still seems dedicated to the proposition of big government. His tax plan belies his progressive leanings. Just consider what he wants to do. He wants to create a special set of tax incentives for the manufacturing industry.

What gives him the right?

Consider what conservatives are saying about his tax plan. “Giving a preferential rate is picking winners and losers through the tax code,” said Curtis Dubay, a tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “The goal of tax reform should be a neutral tax code.”

“This is not free-market economics, this is trying to tilt the market toward manufacturing, and it will hurt the economy rather than help it, because resources would be artificially diverted from other sectors of the economy to manufacturing,” Dubay said.

Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Santorum’s plan would “create the biggest tax dodge in history,” as businesses raced to redefine themselves as manufacturers.

“How do you define manufacturing?” asked Andy Roth of the conservative Club for Growth. “Do movie studios manufacture films? Do book publishers, when they send a .pdf of a manuscript to China, are they manufacturing books? Companies are going to game this.”

In short, Santorum's tax plan is a lobbyists dream come true. This is more of the same. One party favors one sector of the economy and the other party favors the other sector of the economy and a civil war brews in the space between. And that is why Rick Santorum is NOT my first choice.

It's not his sweater vest that is old school - it's his politics.

by C. C. Kurzeja 2012 All Rights Reserved