It is possible to enjoy a person’s writing style and the sound of the gears whirring in the brain even while disagreeing with what you are reading. People forget to remember that fairly often.
Thus, today I take strong exception to a writer I enjoy, Ann Coulter.
Ann staged a little nutty about Catholic Sen. Santorum HERE.
[…]
Santorum is not as conservative as his social-issues credentials suggest. He is more of a Catholic than a conservative, [?] which means he’s good on 60 percent of the issues, but bad on others, such as big government social programs. He’d be Ted Kennedy if he didn’t believe in God. [Inapt and inept. I think the only thing Santorum and Kennedy had in common is that they were baptized.]
Santorum may not be a big spender as far as professional politicians go, but he is still a professional politician. In 2005, one of his former aides described him as “a Catholic missionary who happens to be in the Senate.” [She seems to be accepting that last description. Therefore Santorum is in Coulter’s mind he is, at the same time, a “pro pol” but also a “Catholic missionary who happens to be in the Senate”. Perhaps she wrote that paragraph under the influence of sleep deprivation.]
The Catholic missionary was fantastic on issues like partial-birth abortion, [And yet he is supposed to be like Ted Kennedy, right?] but more like a Catholic bishop in his support for No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug entitlement program (now costing taxpayers more than $60 billion a year), and a highway bill with a Christmas tree of earmarks, including the famous “bridge to nowhere.”
Santorum cites his father’s admonition to put any extra money in the poor box at church to explain his wanting to use the federal government to help the poor. [So… no aid for the poor? None?]
You get only one or two big issues in a presidential campaign. But in the middle of the second Great Depression, [We are nowhere near the suffering that implied. Yet.] Santorum is on the campaign trail saying, “The reason I ran is ’cause I think people know there is more than just a little narrow issue called ‘jobs.'”
Actually, this year, it’s pretty much just jobs.
[…]
I think we can and must talk about more than one issue at a time, even in the campaign season.
The bottom line is that – insofar as this piece is concerned – she implies that if someone is Catholic she can’t be conservative. Did you get that impression as well?
In any event, it is possible to enjoy a person’s writing style and even while disagreeing with what you are reading.
