The Most Unsurprising Thing Ever — Rick Santorum Is a Hypocrite

If you had to name the most pious, smug, and smarmy politician on the circuit today, who would you choose? For my money it’s Senator Rick Santorum. No one comes off as more judgmental of his fellow Americans than Santorum. If you’re gay he doesn’t want you getting married. If you’re poor he doesn’t want to help you eat because like all good Republicans he figures you must have done something to yourself to be in that state, so you can just pick yourself up by your bootstraps (like none of them have ever had to do), and fix it yourself. He really is much better suited to be a Catholic Priest than a United States elected official — and yet he’s out there all the time warning us about the dangers of our increasingly immoral society.

As it turns out, Ricky might have a problem surging up from behind that he’s going to have to address. The Federal Election Committee has issued a complaint against Santorum’s 2012 presidential campaign, stating that Santorum illegally funneled a one million dollar check from a donor into his SuperPAC. The response from Santorum’s spokesperson was the predictable mix of “we haven’t read all the details yet” and “we’re pretty sure we didn’t do anything wrong but in case we did, this little nugget of a sound bite will serve to exonerate us since we sort of alluded to possibly being guilty.”

“We have not received a copy of the complaint and when we do, we will refer it to our attorney,” said Santorum spokesperson Virginia Davis. She continued, “We are confident that neither Sen. Santorum nor any campaign staff member solicited funds in excess of the federal limits or from sources prohibited under federal law.” Like I said, it’s pretty much a game of denial and thinly-veiled admission of guilt.

So why am I even bringing this up? After all, the election was last year, Santorum wasn’t even really a contender, and in the grand scheme of things, one million dollars is nothing compared to how much the 2012 election actually cost. Well, I bring it up for the same reason that I recently wrote about Ron Paul’s campaign being under investigation for bribing an Iowa state senator – to point out the utter hypocrisy of politicians on the right claiming that it’s the left that’s corrupt.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to defend the Jesse Jackson, Juniors of the world either. I’m probably more of a partisan than I’d care to admit — but grift is grift and corruption is corruption. I think I’m particularly enthusiastic about Santorum, Paul and Michele Bachmann’s alleged campaign ethics violations because Republicans have tried for five years to paint the Obama administration as the most corrupt administration ever. You would think that in today’s modern world where nothing ever goes away thanks to the Internet and digital data trails, that politicians of every stripe would be extra careful not to level criticisms at their opponent when they know full-well they are engaged in shady politicking themselves.

Then again, if politicians stopped doing shady political things would they be politicians anymore? That I suppose is ultimately my point here — that we should continue to remain cautious about people on either side of the aisle who would rather paint everything over with a thick coat of piety than to just be honest and real with us about their vision of how America should run. It seems to me that the politicians who where their moral superiority on their sleeves are the ones most often hiding something underneath those sleeves. The mark of morality in a person is in their actions, not in their words. For all her talk of how badly the system is skewed against the working class, it’s the fact that Senator Liz Warren is actually doing something about it with her time in Congress that confirms her sense of morality and ethics.

Morality is a tricky thing. When used the right way, it can be a tool by which to separate you from your competitors, should politics be your game. You can look like the one who has the most pure intentions. You can be the one to run on a platform of “reform and change” of the old ways. Here’s the thing about playing the game of high-minded morality though — you have to stick with it. You have to walk the walk, otherwise the target is on your back and it’s just a matter of time until someone founds out you took a cool million dollars from a donor and pocketed it into your dark money hole…and at that point, all your moral superiority is left in your rear-view mirror.