A Return to Civility

By Crispin Sartwell

 

 

Santorum said that Democratic protests over Republican efforts to ensure confirmation votes would be like the Nazi dictator seizing Paris and then saying: "I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city? It's mine."

Associated Press

 

 

Speech on the floor of the Senate by Senator Crispin Sartwell:

 

I make a pledge right here, right now, that I will never compare the honorable Rick Santorum to Adolf Hitler, at least not here, in this hallowed chamber.

    But let me be clear: Rick Santorum ≠ whatever his politics or personality may be ≠ conspicuously lacks that little mustache. Until such time as he grows a little mustache, any comparison to Adolf Hitler ≠plausible though it might otherwise be - must be held in abeyance.

    Besides, comparing people to Hitler has become a boring clichÈ. It really has very little oomph anymore: it's what you say when, like Rick Santorum, you are incapable of even rudimentary ratiocination.

   He is, rather, the Jeffrey Dahmer of this, the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world. He has kidnapped, butchered and then devoured our traditions; nay he has kidnapped, butchered and devoured Patrick Leahy himself. He even looks a bit like Jeffrey Dahmer, with that weird little smile so widely and plausibly associated with cannibalism.

    Probably a comparison to John Wayne Gacy, who stuffed the crawlspaces of his Illinois home with the bodies of adolescent boys, would be unfair. Nevertheless, Gacy was known as the "killer clown," because he performed at children's parties with a red squeaky nose and huge funny shoes between his homicidal rampages. If I were to refer to my esteemed colleague, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, as a killer clown, I don't think anyone could really quibble.

   Remember the Manson family, with their weird blank zombie eyes and x's carved into their foreheads? Now we see the whole thing happening again in the Ronald Reagan office building with the honorable Rick Santorum and his staff. The fact that all his legislative initiatives have been derived from playing Beatles songs backwards as he trips on psychedelic drugs may be a coincidence. Then again, it may not be.

    But these are mere serial killers, and Rick Santorum is more ambitious, more wide-ranging in his goals, more thorough in his methods. In brief, Rick Santorum is a genocidal maniac.

    Don't get me wrong. Comparisons to Hitler are at best premature. But the parallel to the career of Pol Pot is uncanny: the radical agenda, the re-education camps, the weird murderous psychosis, and the pyramids of skulls stacked up in this very chamber all attest to that. I count myself lucky to have survived. So many ≠ Barbara Boxer, Robert Byrd, John Kerry himself ≠ have fallen before Santorum's insane machete-wielding minions.

    Blinded by his bizarre suprematist ideology, Rick Santorum's slavish devotees ≠ once ordinary Americans now converted into killing machines ≠ have swept out across this great land rounding up secular humanists and torturing them to death rhetorically.

   Perhaps most deeply disturbing, however, is the cult of personality. The honorable Rick Santorum has deforested western Pennsylvania and replaced the trees with colossal statues of the honorable Rick Santorum. He has specified that all Pennsylvanians must refer to him as "The Adorable Leader," even as he becomes ever-more repulsive in his personal grooming habits.

    But try as he might, Rick Santorum will never really measure up to Hitler. Senator, I knew Adolf Hitler, and you're no Adolf Hitler.

 

Crispin Sartwell represents the persistent vegetative state in the United States Senate.