Now that GOP presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is flying high in the polls – higher than Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul – many questionable comments he has made in the past are surfacing.
When it comes to Santorum's past comments regarding the relationship of Satan and the United States, a simple response of ‘the Devil made me do it’ isn’t going to suffice.
Via the Drudge Report headline on Tuesday, ‘Santorum’s Satan Warning,’ many pundits, politicos, and Drudge Report readers are wondering where Santorum’s heart and mind are concerning the his view of the United States.
The Drudge Report dug up a 2008 speech that the GOP front-runner presented to students at Florida’s Ave Maria University in which Santorum said:
Satan has his sights on the United States of America! Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of price, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American traditions…
This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions.
Santorum went on to say that Protestantism in the U.S.A. is ‘gone from the world of Christianity.’
Santorum said that he can and will defend the somewhat-startling 4-year-old statements. At the same time, he criticized Drudge for publishing such dramatic headlines at this point in time. He referred to the entire issue concerning the Drudge Report article, accompanied by an eerie black-and-white photo of Santorum standing at a cross-laden podium, as a 'joke.'
His first comments to the media regarding the Drudge story on Tuesday was:
You know, I’m a person of faith. I believe in good and evil. I think if somehow or another because you’re a person of faith you believe in good and evil is a disqualifier for president, we’re going to have a very small pool of candidates who can run for president…
Look, guys, these are questions that are not relevant to what’s – what’s being discussed in America today. What we’re talking about in America today is trying to get America growing. That’s what my speeches are about, that’s what we’re going to talk about in this campaign…
If they want to dig up old speeches of talking to a religious group, they can go ahead and do so, but I’m going to stay on message, and I’m going to talk about things that Americans want to talk about, which is creating jobs, making our country more secure, and yeah, talking about forces around this world who want to do harm to America, and you bet I will take them on.
In what was likely Santorum’s best explanation of his past comments on Satan and the United States, he compared his 2008 comments to statements made by Ronald Reagan. Santorum said:
Ronald Reagan did it. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire and the media went wild.
Santorum said that Reagan told it the way it was to promote the values of America.
Whether Santorum's comparison of his 2008 statements on evil to Reagan's statements on evil in the 1980s will quell the story remains to be seen.
Pundits who opine across the talk-radio dial and the television network channels are discussing Santorum's latest challenge regarding his Satan comments. Ultra-conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh even takes Santorum to task on his Satan comments by suggesting that Santorum has some serious explaining to do.
The primary source of this story is the Drudge Report.
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Source: Drudge Report, Politico
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