A couple of days ago, Roy Edroso noticed that conservative writers are irate, this time about the media’s coverage of Rick Santorum’s interest in pornography — which the candidate believes has brought about “a pandemic of harm” upon the nation. “Why is this suddenly coming up now?” asked a Hot Air blogger. “Did the media simply notice a longstanding statement on Santorum’s website about porn or is he actively circulating it, presumably to counter the meme that he’s anti-woman?”

It’s not that complicated. Amid all the problems facing this country, the fight against pornography is what Santorum has chosen to champion. Here he is on CNN this morning, defending his claim that the Obama administration’s Justice Department “seems to favor pornographers over children and families”:

“Well you have to look at the proof that’s in the prosecution. Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously under existing law than they are under the Obama administration. So you draw your conclusion,” Santorum said. “My conclusion is they have not put a priority on prosecuting these cases, and in doing so, they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm. And that to me says they’re putting the unenforcement of this law and putting children at risk as a result of that.”

My guess is whatever bump Santorum has gotten from the issue, he’s about to enjoy seriously diminishing returns. Reacting to Santorum’s CNN appearance, Republican strategist Ron Christie remarked on Twitter, “I like Rick Santorum. I really do. But discussing how he would get rid of porn as a presidential priority doesn’t seem presidential.”

Even so, I’m vaguely sympathetic. I mean, if you were a Republican candidate for president, would you really want to spend your time talking about an improving economy?

The last time I subbed for Ed I wrote about a characteristically poor Maureen Dowd column. Since it’s Sunday, and political coverage seems, at least for the moment, relegated to Rick Santorum’s chest hair, I see no reason not to don the wetsuit and snorkel and dive back in.

The hook for today’s offering is a strained metaphor about the renovation of Mitt Romney’s home. Apparently, the furnished basement is a reminder that Romney is “an out-of-touch plutocrat and that his true nature is buried where we can’t see it.” (I’d have gone with an iceberg, but c’est la vie.) There is perhaps a good column to be written on that idea, but this isn’t that column.

In fact, Dowd seems to have gotten a hold of the Romney oppo book and The Book of Mormon, dropped both in a blender and hit puree.

I’ve condensed it for you:

Celestial Kingdom … the Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms … baptized anyone and everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis. … Mormon feminists … celebrities and Holocaust victims … Ann Romney’s Welsh dad … Elie Wiesel … baptized over 600,000 Holocaust victims…. “Poor Anne Frank. As if she didn’t suffer enough.”

I left out the part where Dowd compares Romney to Al Gore — both of whom, according to the Pulitzer-winning columnist, are “animatronic.” They’re in good company: In December, Dowd wrote, “Like another animatronic candidate, Michael Dukakis, Romney uses his wife as a way to convey passion…”

I have two hopes for the Times op-ed page: That Gail Collins eventually drops her obsession with the Romney family dog, and that Maureen Dowd stops treating her column like Mad Libs.

Much attention was given to this week’s Fox News interview with Mitt Romney during which the candidate, as is his wont, performed poorly. His interviewer, Megyn Kelly, didn’t exactly go after him, but neither was the interview the lovefest to which Romney had probably become accustomed. Fox has actually been incredibly hospitable to the candidate, to such an extent that at least one talking head is palpably annoyed:

“I don’t really know what they’re doing, NBC’s Meet The Press host David Gregory said recently. “He is becoming a Fox News contributor apparently, in terms of his interviews over there trying to reach a conservative audience.”

Romney hasn’t appeared on Gregory’s show, despite repeated public invitations. Romney’s reportedly doing an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes soon, but he hasn’t given the other networks the same love as Fox.

I think the ire is misdirected. Yes, it’s certainly pathetic that Romney, a veteran politician, so lacks confidence that he won’t take questions from an actual news organization. But that’s the least of it. If you truly want evidence of the lengths to which Romney will go to stay in friendly territory, the proof is not in his eight appearances this year with Sean Hannity. In fact, if you can believe it, Romney has found an interviewer even less objective: His biographer, Hugh Hewitt.

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In the New Republic, Alec MacGillis has a brilliantly insightful article (behind a pay wall) about the growing hostility towards Obama of many former supporters among the wealthiest hedge fund managers in the country.

MacGillis describes what these guys liked about Obama during the 2008 campaign, and what they now despise—not too strong a word—about him. Back then, Obama seemed like almost a mirror image of themselves to the hedge fund crew: he was a meritocrat, like them. He didn’t come from “old money” and neither did most of them. He was president of the Harvard Law Review because he was genuinely, measurably brilliant—just like them. The test scores, the excellent schools, the demonstrated achievement proved it. Just a bunch of brilliant guy who manipulate money admiring another brilliant guy that some of them actually went to school with.

Then he started talking about raising their taxes, especially by ending the “carried interest” tax loophole, and he called them “fat cats” once, and they even claimed that they were worried about excess government debt. And so now most of them hate him, a crazy hate that, as MacGillis notes, doesn’t seem quite rational, given how mild most of Obama’s rhetoric and policies have been, and given that, as Obama himself has noted, a lot of voters think that he has been way too accommodating of financial sector. And they’re raising money hand over fist for Romney—even those of them who, famously, supported same sex marriage in New York. Now, as Barney Frank is quoted as saying in the article, they want to put in power the party that fanatically opposes gay rights.

MacGillis has a lot of astute explanations for all of this, some of them materialist, and some of them psychological. You should get your hands on the piece and consider all of them. But one that I found particularly arresting and convincing is that the very thing that helped Obama win their support originally—his intellectual/demographic similarity—now threatens them. Right, Obama might have been their classmate. Was their classmate in some cases (as he reminded some of them during a meeting in 2010). And that was the problem—Obama was asking them—in his cool Obama way, not in FDR’s almost maliciously naughty, “I welcome their hatred” way—to demonstrate some social solidarity, some noblesse oblige. And this pushed all the wrong buttons. As MacGillis writes, “That, in between his relatively measured lines about tax codes and financial reform, he was delivering an unmistakable moral judgment about the worth of the profession they had chosen. That the story they were telling themselves about their own lives was highly questionable.” Yes, they had chosen one life. And this guy they had played basketball with at Harvard had done just fine—he was president!—but he had chosen another life. He taught law, did community organizing, and didn’t dedicate himself to making a billion bucks per year or more (literally in the case of the top 40 or so hedge fund managers, something Obama also pointed out to them at the 2010 meeting). By liberal blogospheric lights, Obama isn’t enough of a lefty. But by the standards of his old hedge fund buddies, Obama enrages them because he shames them.

And it is interesting to compare this dynamic to what FDR confronted from the superrich of his presidency. Back then, old WASP wealth dominated the banking and financial industries. It wasn’t, for the most part, “earned” meritocratic wealth. And thus oddly enough, FDR, like Obama, knew these guys from the school—he was from the old money WASP aristocracy, too. He blew off his Harvard classes to go sailing—just like a lot of them must have. After all, they were going to stay rich, no matter what—they didn’t need to graduate Harvard with honors. FDR thought most rich people were, like himself prior to polio, fatuous, lazy toffs. The rich had never impressed him, he thought they were sort of lazy fools. But then, after he became governor and then president, his laughter became more cutting, and he realized he couldn’t let them smugly continue to destroy the country.

Today, the rich are very impressed with themselves based upon self-perceived merit, not their families of origin. And they thought that Obama, being a fellow meritocrat, would be impressed with them, too. They earned it—just like the president—so, surely, he would admire them, and would never call them fat cats (verbal criticisms stings these guys as much or more than policy proposals that affect their wallets). So, yeah, they thought Obama was like them—and he is, sort of, that’s the funny thing—and now they’re mad he called them out in the pretty minimal way he did. What the hedge funders don’t seem to realize is that, while Obama doesn’t respect them all that much, he respects their meritocratic achievement—and, therefore, his own—just enough not to have the full throated, glib contempt for them that FDR had for his wealthy peer group.

If you think you worked hard and plus have a superior intellect that all the good schools and all the good grades and test score ratify, then you’re going to be, at least, minimally empathetic, to those who took a different path than you did after Columbia and Harvard. Obama gets these guys, finds them wanting, but, ultimately, like he does with almost everyone from John Boehner to Bibi Netanyahu— understands and contextualizes them. It’s his great strength and his great weakness all rolled into one.

On the other hand, if you think you’re just a lucky sob born into money and you’re not a particularly analytical type to begin with—and, then, you’re humanized by a crippling disease, and a empathetic spouse—-you’re going to think your peers are just lucky sob’s born into money, too. So you’re not going to be very kind to your old Harvard classmates. You’re going to view them, at best, instrumentally, and, at worst, as everything that’s wrong about America.

Leon Cooperman and the rest of these hedge fund guys should thank God they were born when they were, and that they can comfort themselves with their meritocratic badges of honor. This president at least understands them, and, yes, he’s not all that impressed, but he sees their are reasons why the are the way they are. But it could have been much worse. They could have gotten FDR, remembering what lazy bozos they all were during their college days. He would have just laughed in their faces—at least, Obama’s never done that.

Yesterday, David Brooks wrote a typical David Brooks column. It was thoughtfully focused on the intersection between psychology and public policy, specifically on how Barack Obama’s personality will effect what policies he advocates in his possible second term. Brooks, as we all know, reads and synthesizes lots of social science research. He’s interested in how our brains mitigate or prohibit political and social possibilities, often in ways that we are not even aware. This is a big thing for Brooks: we have all kinds of cognitive biases and affective prejudices of which we simply ourselves don’t understand. The tip of the mental iceberg obscures all the stuff way below it—but that’s the stuff that defines our politics, our mate preference, our entire world view.

So it is odd to read Brooks writing about the one person on earth who can transcend all of these unconscious tendencies—president Obama. Brooks is, as always, worried about debt, deficits, and entitlements. He thinks that unless the next president fixes this, a debt crisis will be “imminent.” (That he is wrong about this gives him no pause—one social scientist whose work Brooks doesn’t seem to follow or understand is the Nobel Laureate opposite him on the Times op-ed page). So it’s all up to Obama. As Brooks writes:

Leading the country through this will require the intelligence, balance and craftiness that Obama has demonstrated. But it will also require indomitable inner conviction and an aggressive drive to push change. It will require a fearless champion who will fight all the interests that love the tax code the way it is. It will require a fervent crusader to rally the country behind shared sacrifice. It will take an impervious leader willing to spread spending cuts everywhere and offend everybody all at once. There will have to be a clearly defined vision of what government will look like at the end.

And this is where I don’t know what David Brooks is thinking. David Brooks thinks that Obama can not only master his own reflexive and unconscious prejudices and limitations. He thinks that he can, also, exhibit a Promethean power of self-creation which leads to national recreation. According to Brooks, Obama must be “indomitable”, “fearless” and “impervious” in order to change the sclerotic institutions of American government.

But, most of the rest of the time, David Brooks tells us that we can barely can master what food we order at McDonald’s—sure, we order, but there are so many variables about which we have no conscious clue. So why the Big Mac, rather than the fish fillet—none of us know! Yet Obama must overcome the massive structural impediments of our governance—and, if he does not, the failure must be his.

In Brooks’s terms, this makes no sense. And Brooks hasn’t even kept up with the latest social science syntheses, one that almost every other Washington based or centered writer has been talking about this week. In the New Yorker, Ezra Klein argues that, according to the political scientist George Edwards and several of his colleagues, presidential persuasion is, simply, a myth, a fetishization thru which we imbue presidents with a power to alter the partisan and political landscape which they simply don’t possess. Klein gives us several examples of how delusional the belief in the great communication skills of a president is. It doesn’t work with the general public—presidential approval polls or support for presidential positions don’t go up after a big White House “messaging” push. And big speeches and, often, even private bi-partisan meetings don’t lead to legislation being passed thru a Congress controlled or obstructed by the opposition party. George W Bush, a president very different than Obama, yet a very willful one, failed utterly to get a Democratic Congress to go along with his plans to privatize social security. In fact, the opposite occurs—as Klein writes, the research demonstrates that “…Presidential persuasion might actually have an anti-persuasive effect on the opposing party in Congress.” In short, when Obama proposes something, Republicans are even more likely to oppose it than if, say, a Democratic Senator did so. Why? It’s a matter of incentives—what’ good for a Democratic president is bad for a Republican Congress.

Brooks doesn’t acknowledge any of this in his column even though he had ample time to read Klein’s article before he wrote his column. Instead, he employs the hoary cliches of hortatory uplift—We can be saved, but only if Barack Obama displays all the transcendent power and brilliance of an Ubermensch.

And this is coming from a guy who spends the rest of his time diminishing the significance of the conscious and willful application of values to politics (which is more of what you’d expect from a conservative—after all, in this view, human agency should yield to transhistorical verities and habits of mind). In summary, for Brooks, none of us know much about how to live our lives, yet Obama somehow is the exception to that rule. And not only the exception to that rule, but the exception to the structural limitations of a presidential system of government which creates dual sources of political legitimacy during times of divided government—and thus brings even a superman of the Oval Office down to earth. Which is exactly the kind of social science analysis we expect David Brooks to be completely conversant with, and ruefully mindful of. Yet Brooks doesn’t at all integrate his own well honed arguments about human nature into this column. And he doesn’t even integrate the very relevant social science research du jour on this very same subject—presidential persuasion—into the column, either.

All of this kind of makes me wonder if Brooks is only right in a limited, but profoundly personal sense: Yes, maybe it’s true that we really don’t have sufficient control over our preferences and patterns of thought. And the perfect case study for this theory would seem to be the work of David Brooks.

Amanda Terkel at Huffpost has an interesting article about a possible platform fight over same sex marriage at the Democratic National Convention.

Even some Democrats who support same sex marriage, like Maryland governor and likely 2016 presidential candidate, Martin O’Malley, worry that the issue could distract from staying “focused on jobs.” All of this, of course, is made trickier because of President Obama’s still “evolving” position on the issue.

The idea of a platform fight seems as quaint as the era of black and white televisions from which they last occurred. Democrats had a platform fight about Vietnam in 1968 and a platform fight about abortion and gay rights in 1972.

But, looking at all of this thru the long lens of human rights history and the Democratic party, this is very mild stuff. Nobody is going to bolt the party. Nobody thinks the issue of same sex marriage is one that will destroy the country, or traumatize western civilization. Everybody, in fact, including the president, probably supports same sex marriage. Yes, party officials are trying to “manage” the issue, but they are working with gay rights advocates as colleagues who share the same values. And this is a natural and classic tension, not an ideological crisis.

Contrast that to 1924. The KKK controlled roughly half of the delegates to the Democratic convention. And—think of this for a second—a platform plank that would have condemned the Klan was DEFEATED at that convention. And in 1948, Strom Thurmond—not the crusty, cuddly old hornball we remember from the end of his time in the Senate, but a full blown racist demagogue at the peak of his powers—led Southerners out of the convention to protest a plank that would have opposed lynching and supported the integration of public schools.

This time, nobody is walking out, and nobody is championing the violent bigotry of white supremacy or any other bigotry. It’s not quite good enough yet, but the struggle to transform what once seemed unthinkably dangerous and weird into the humanely quotidian continues to progress.

Ever watch this show Undercover Boss on CBS? The premise is simple: the CEO of a company goes undercover, disguised as an ordinary worker, at his company for a couple of weeks. And thus he discovers what it is to really work at (almost always) his company. My daughter loves it for some reason, so I watch along sometimes. The show I saw last week, for example, was at a novelty company based in Kansas, I think—I got pineapple chotkes from them for my daughter’s “Hawaii themed” 5th birthday party. The jobs, of course, suck—these are working class jobs, and they aren’t fun, nor do they pay particularly well. And the CEO gets humanized by this—frequently, he’s pretty lousy at doing the job himself (not surprising, he’s never done it before). He staying in some off-highway Motel 6 for a couple of weeks, instead of his usual five star downtown hotel. This CEO from the novelty company, with his undercover wig and braces, goes home and tells his wife and kids that he’s been working a 10-6 night shift, and—props to Charles Murray!- his 16 year old daughter asks, “Do people actually work at that hour?” Nice girl, but she’ got no clue—why would she? They live in a suburban palace.

And the workers are mostly decent, hardworking people (the jerks get edited out, I guess, except once in awhile, they keep a jerk in for dramatic effect—boy will he be surprised when he sees that novice worker to whom he was trashing the company is really the boss!). And then, at the end of the show, the boss reveals his identity to the workers, and he beneficently gives them money to help with their sick kids or parents, or a new workrule that doesn’t really change much of anything, e.g. free gatorade during the hot months at a particularly oppressive factory, or, sometimes, a promotion if they’re really good. Even a 25 cents per hour raise for the folks on this shift—$500 per year before taxes. Woohoo!

Even though it’s not very much—low five figures in money usually—it matters, of course, to these people a great deal. And they are deeply grateful—any of us would be in their shoes. And they frequently cry—and the boss looks good (sometimes he cries too) and the company looks good. End of story.

And I’m thinking: this is really poignant, yet pathetic: this is the story of the working class today. Dependent upon the kindness of strangers (nobody EVER recognizes the boss—they usually don’t recognize him even after he takes off his
disguise). Happy for handouts from the boss fairy. Of course, they really need a union—an institutional voice that speaks for all of them, not the ones lucky enough to unknowingly work with the boss for a couple of weeks. And they certainly need universal health insurance—there is always a theme involving sick relatives- just to get thru the emergencies in their lives. Sports drinks when the workplace feels like an oven?! They’d get more than sports drinks if they could collectively bargain with the boss—maybe a new ventilation system. And they used to have that voice, they used to have those unions. But those days are gone. Now it’s like winning the lottery—if they happen to find out the “undercover” boss was on their shift, then they get a few bucks, and a week’s vacation (another popular “gift” item). It’s sentimental and evades any serious questions about power relationships in this country. It’s humiliating for a great country to produce stuff like this as “entertainment”, and it’s deeply depressing, too.

TGIF, y’all. Here’s what I’ve got after cleaning out the blog grinder:

* Excitement builds for oral arguments in Supreme Court in ObamaCare suit.

* Gallup says GOP voter enthusiasm for Romney & Santorum lower than for McCain in 2008, which was not at riotous levels itself.

* Peggy Noonan bravely criticizes sexism, blames it on Left, the Internet, and of course, Obama.

* Times’ Jeff Zeleny peers into murky Missouri caucus process, sees pretty strong support for Santorum.

* Breitbartians single me out as exemplar of “DC Media” who “freaked out” and are “venting” in response to Palin’s BREITBART IS HERE manifesto. Truth is, I was mostly laughing.

This weekend we’ll have the aforementioned murky (and thus probably inconsequential) MO caucuses, and the Puerto Rico primary. Covering the desk here at Political Animal will be the duo of Rich Yeselson on Saturday and Elon Green on Sunday, both of whom have blogged here recently. Please make them welcome.

See you next week.

Selah.

Off and on all day, I’ve been mulling over Ezra Klein’s column suggesting that the independent ballot lines being secured by the American Elect group could, regardless of whatever horror they might produce in the 2012 presidential election, eventually become an avenue for candidates (particularly incumbents) to bypass party primaries and reduce the disciplinary power of liberal and conservative “bases.”

Though his language is carefully neutral, there’s zero doubt Ezra understands this is mainly, at the moment at least, a problem for Republicans. There are plenty of moderate Democrats in Congress, while it’s a vanishing breed in the GOP. For that matter, by any measurement, the Democratic “base” is significantly more diverse ideologically (and in every other way) than its GOP counterpart. All the examples of potentially liberated moderates Ezra cites are Republicans. So it’s reasonable to ask: are Republican moderates more successful in places where the disciplinary power of primaries is weaker?

Not so you’d notice. Open primaries, where independents (or in states with no party registration, anyone) can participate, are most prevalent in the South. It goes without saying that southern Republicans are not noted for their openness to moderation and bipartisanship. Louisiana has abolished party primaries altogether. Are its Republicans paragons of non-ideological sensibility? I don’t think so.

But maybe that’s just one of those “southern things.” California recently abolished party primaries by ballot initiative. We don’t have any record yet of how that will affect elections, but you probably know bipartisanship hasn’t exactly broken out in the Golden State as of this writing.

After years of thinking and writing on the subject of polarization, I’ve personally grown skeptical about simple structural explanations or solutions for the problem (with the possible exception of radical campaign finace reform, which is structural, but not exactly simple). The most obvious solution, and one that does not involve empowering shadowy “independent” groups like Americans Elect or weakening the parties, is simply to let general elections do their own magic. Parties that consistently fail to offer general electorates palatable choices will eventually lose. If Republicans keep nominating people like Christine O’Donnell for high office, they’ll keep losing Senate seats, and at some point, even ideological zealots will get tired of losing. Conversely, giving Mike Castle a free pass to the general election will eliminate the incentive of Republicans who either don’t like Christine O’Donnell or don’t like to lose to hang in there and fight for control of their party. At some point, giving up on party primaries runs the risk of giving up on the parties as vehicles for political expression and governance, and it’s not clear the country is, or should be, ready for that.

But it’s still worth discussing, particularly if Ezra Klein, who will continue to make valuable contributions to the chattering classes long after I’m packed off to the nursing home, says so.

I read with interest Daniel Luzer’s post at College Guide today about the status of class-action suits against law schools for misprepresenting their post-graduate placement and earnings statistics. Apparently, the attorney spearheading the effort eventually plans to haul a sizable number of schools into the suit, claiming a systemic pattern of lying to applicants about how likely they are to get work and pull down big bux as a legal beagle.

Will this cut down on the number of folks entering the shark tank? I dunno; as someone with a law degree who never actually practiced the sinful craft, I’m a little out of touch with expectations. Most of my law school classmates were there because they watched a lot of Perry Mason or decided in the fifth grade that they were going to be president some day. Quite a few of the women (this was back in the late 1970s when women were just beginning to enter law schools in nearly proportionate numbers) were former legal secretaries who had grown tired of doing the work of hotshot junior associates getting paid a lot more money than they were. And some students were like me, pursuing a legal education (as the old saying went) as “the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

Only about half my classmates had jobs upon graduation (and it was a pretty good law school, actually), though most found something within the next year. Some (again, like me) used the degree as a credential to do something else in a field with lower alcoholism levels, and where no one would ever again ask your class standing. Only a small percentage landed jobs with big law firms in Atlanta, Washington or New York.

Those were simpler days at a public university with low tuition and much lower student indebtedness, so it’s probably not analogous to today’s situation. I’m all for transparency in higher education, and do think it’s terrible that people make life-changing decisions based on false assurances of big fat jobs at big fat salaries. But I do wonder when it’s all over if far too many people will continue to enter the Paper Chase for the imagined glory, and because they just can’t think of anything else to do.

The New York Times took advantage of publicity over the surprise victory of Roy Moore as GOP nominee for Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in Tuesday’s primaries to thunder editorially against the election of judges:

Mr. Moore plainly benefited from his name recognition — as disturbing as that thought is — and strong support from many of the same evangelical voters who backed Rick Santorum in the presidential primary. His victory is yet one more reminder that choosing judges in partisan elections, rather than through a system of merit selection, can create a serious problem of quality control.

But what’s really bugging the Times about partisan judicial elections, it seems, isn’t that it elevates the occasional yahoo, but that it attracts special-interest money. Here’s where the editorial gets really exercised in terms of the Alabama race:

The taint from all the special interest money has been especially strong in Alabama. The judicial candidates in Tuesday’s decisive primary contests raised roughly $2 million. In 2006, candidates for five Supreme Court seats spent a total of $13.4 million in both the primary and general election. While the numbers will certainly end up lower this year, it may be because all but one current member of the State Supreme Court was elected with strong business backing and the plaintiff’s bar and other opposing interests with their own deep pockets decided it was not worth competing.

All true. As I noted in my post on Roy yesterday, Alabama was Ground Zero for Karl Rove’s efforts back in the day to obtain business-community financial backing for a Republican takeover of state courts.

But you can’t conflate that problem with Judge Roy. The $2 million the Times mentions as having been spent on the Chief Justice race was mostly spent by his two opponents, whom he beat like a drum. As was the case in his vastly underfunded 2010 gubernatorial campaign, Moore refused to accept “special-interest money,” and only spent $230,000 overall, not a lot for a statewide campaign.

You could make the argument that Roy’s notoriety forced his opponent’s to grub for special-interest money, and I don’t disagree with the Times’ basic position (I’ll never forget being in Nevada years ago right before an election, and being shocked by the TV ads for a judicial candidate who bragged that he had been nicknamed “The Hanging Judge,” a practice which, fortunately, is prohibited by Bar Association rules in most states). But let’s give the old man his due: he may be unhinged, but he’s unbought.

No one was much surprised when the most frequent conservative response to the furor over Rush Limbaugh’s slut-shaming of Sandra Fluke was not to defend or criticize Rush, but to play “So’s Your Old Man” by pointing at liberals who had supposedly engaged in similar behavior. After trying out Ed Schultz and a variety of more obscure figures as equivalents, the pack eventually settled on comedian Bill Maher, who had used especially vile words in reference to Sarah Palin, and more importantly, had just given a million smackers to Barack Obama’s Super-PAC. As the attacks on Maher increased, even Limbaugh himself got into the act, chortling about the possibility that Maher might be driven from the airwaves instead of Himself.

But the Limbaugh-Maher equivalence game has just taken a more serious turn now that Mitt Romney—whose reaction to the Limbaugh slut-shaming was the tips-from-the-coach comment that it was “not language I would have used”—has denounced Maher and called it “outrageous” that the Super-PAC hadn’t returned his money.

So let’s look at this for a moment. I am not a big fan of Maher’s, finding him often less than hilarious, and a bit too smug and self-satisfied in his political satire for someone who endorsed Ralph Nader in 2000. But his self-defense against the equivalence games being played made some good and essential points. He is a comedian, not someone telling 20 million people how to think and vote. And in terms of his target as compared to Limbaugh’s, he’s right, there’s no equivalence at all:

[Limbaugh] went after a civilian about very specific behavior, that was a lie, speaking for a party that has systematically gone after women’s rights all year, on the public airwaves. I used a rude word about a public figure who gives as good as she gets, who’s called people “terrorist” and “unAmerican.” Sarah Barracuda. The First Amendment was specifically designed for citizens to insult politicians. Libel laws were written to protect law students speaking out on political issues from getting called whores by Oxycontin addicts.

The reference to Fluke as a “civilian” is a little annoying, at least for those of us who dislike military combat metaphors for politics. But the basic point is exactly right, and goes to what made the attacks on Fluke both significant and very typical: Rush Limbaugh is the quintessential bully. He’s a smug SOB speaking for other smug SOBs, who bullies nearly everyone he mentions, up to and including Republican candidates for president of the United States. And he gets away with it, as evidenced by Romney’s craven reaction to the Fluke incident.

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Just saw this tweet from Rick Santorum: “Real World Versus Romney World: Romney Destroyed Massachusetts Manufacturing.” It linked to a press release with the same title, composed of two news items about a reported 12% loss of manufacturing jobs in the Bay State during Mitt’s governorship.

Now I know we all get inured to this sort of thing, and I’m not singling out Santorum; I’m sure Mitt has said similarly violent things about Rick, and I know his Super-PAC has. But still, it’s weird: as sure as the sun comes up in the morning, Rick Santorum will endorse Romney for president if and when he wins the nomination, and will probably campaign with him in the fall. If he’s asked to, he’ll make speeches describing Mitt as a combination of Churchill, Reagan and Cato the Younger. And I’m sure he’d happily consider any old high-level appointment Romney chooses to offer him if he wins in November.

When any of those things happen, I hope someone in a position to do so asks him why he’s willing to support, praise and work for someone who would be so dastardly or incompetent as to destroy Massachusetts manufacturing. I mean, I doubt he’s suggesting Mitt did so by accident, or because he got behind in his paperwork or something. Was Romney perhaps trying to teach Massachusetts manufacturing a lesson for its own good? Does he feel kinda bad about it now?

Look, I know politics ain’t beanbag, and we have every reason to suspect that Rick Santorum thinks beating Romney is pretty damned important; after all, Rick’s not just battling his Republican rivals or Obama, but Satan. But still, this sort of thing can get out of hand, and Rick should tell whatever twenty-something composes this stuff to get a grip.

Oops, I forgot! Santorum is on record saying that presidential candidates should be required to compose their own words! So I guess he’d better sit down with himself for a stern conversation about hyperbole before he winds up looking foolish when he has to make goo-goo eyes at Mitt the Destroyer.

Again, I know I am competing with March Madness, but if you are taking a lunch break or are hoop-o-phobic to begin with, here are some mental snacks:

* Three members of Congress and several prominent civil rights leaders arrested for protesting at Sudanese embassy. You may not know that, but I bet you know George Clooney was also cuffed. His, dad, too.

* Shocker: Catholic bishops played role in pressure campaign to get Komen Foundation to break with Planned Parenthood.

* Another shocker: GOP freshmen rub elbows with donors at Key Largo resort.

* So is it godless liberal media that are drawing attention to Santorum’s social-issues emphasis? No, it’s Daily Caller pointing out his pledge to wage war on internet porn.

* Orrin Hatch did very well in first stage of Utah state caucuses, in good shape for nominating convention.

* In judicial appeal against DOJ denial of preclearance of state voter ID law, Texas calling for judges to strike down entire preclearance process as unconstitutional.

And in non-political news:

* Jury deadlocked in “Desperate Housewives” case.

Back in just a bit.