Rick Santorum: Latest Fictional Character Created by Big Media

There are many ways to spin Rick Santorum’s wins in Alabama and Mississippi, and the news media is busy spinning them, but the fact is that Mitt Romney wasn’t even supposed to show.

Had he been a horse, Mitt Romney would have paid off at the race track, coming in third as a long shot against former Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum.

A Wall Street Journal article today has this to say about Santorum’s corporate tax reform plan:

“By proposing special breaks for manufacturing, Rick Santorum follows the president’s incorrect lead and introduces a significant economic distortion.”

If the phrase “significant economic distortion” needs interpretation, that comes later in the piece where it is made plain that the “Santorum plan adds greatly to federal deficits.”
Following President Obama’s $16T deficit, the Santorum deficits would be even scarier if he had any chance of winning against Obama in the fall. He doesn’t. Yet Mr. Santorum, his ego inflated by appealing to a narrow segment of the electorate, crows cock-a-doodle as the “true conservative.”
The outcome was predictable in states like Mississippi where 80 percent of the state’s residents describe themselves as evangelicals.

It wasn’t much different in Alabama with Governor Bentley insinuating to Fox News before the primary that Romney’s Mormon religion would be a “subtle” factor among the state’s evangelicals.

Facts are facts and there is no point crying about them. After all, we are not Rick Santorum, and we are not Newt Gingrich, both of them candidates of the crying towel.
The biggest takeaway from the night is that Alabama and Mississippi chose Santorum over Gingrich. Both men are flawed in that they are Washington insiders.

But why were the southerners so smitten with Santorum, a one-trick pony if ever there was one? It appears that Santorum’s record of big government voting didn’t trouble too many people in Alabama or Mississippi.

Where Santorum is concerned, there are more questions about the southern votes:

Why did the southerners look past Santorum’s vote against right-to-work bills when right-to-work has been such a boon for southern workers?

Why did the southerners overlook Gingrich and his grasp of politics and government for Santorum who failed badly in Pennsylvania in his 2006 race?

Why did the southerners look past Santorum’s support for turncoat Arlen Specter against a bona fide fiscal conservative and current Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey?

For the south, the answer is simply that he wasn’t vetted nor much thought about. That Santorum should have any credibility in the rest of the country is even more puzzling if you don’t understand he is largely a fictitious creation of Big Media.

Meanwhile, reality moves along outside of anti-Romney media narratives. Counting the vote in Hawaii and American Samoa leads to the official tally that Romney won the night on delegates by 42-38.