Santorum Rallies Votes with Messages of Bigotry and Violence

COMMENTARY | As the Iowa Caucuses draw near Rick Santorum is pushing hard to save his potential candidacy for the GOP nomination to run against Barack Obama later this year. He's doing it two ways. First, he's calling himself a real conservative. Second, he's falling back on the old Republican standby - promising the right-wing that he'll crush anyone "not like them."

Maybe you live in Iran. Maybe you work in a nuclear plant providing energy to your country. You might have brown skin and worship Allah instead of white skin and worship Jesus. If you won't let inspectors in to watch you while you work, Santorum's solution is to bomb you into the Stone Age, he told NBC's Meet The Press.

On the other hand, maybe you're a newlywed. You've just married the love of your life and are setting out on your honeymoon. What can you look forward to under a Santorum administration? If you're gay you can expect a Constitutional Amendment to declare you less deserving of equal treatment under the law than straight people by invalidating your marriage, according to a Huffington Post report.

Santorum's rhetoric carries a lot of those messages. It seems he's more interested in blowing people up or removing their rights than he is about other things - silly things like homeless kids, an economy in ruins, unemployment, record national debt, or sick children without health care. Why worry about those issues when you can rally the red-state troops with a good, old-fashioned message of bigotry, hate and death?

Maybe Santorum thinks that the hate in the hearts of American citizens will keep them warm while they are homeless; that the fires of anger in their bellies will let them feel full while they starve; that supposed "moral wealth" will let them ignore their poverty; that stripping others of their freedom will hide the loss of their own; and that the death of foreigners will make them feel more alive.

It's pretty brazen for him to call himself a real conservative, too. Santorum votes for many wasteful projects and calls it normal Washington horse-trading, according to CNN.

We'll know in a few days if Iowan Republicans are driven by common sense or common hatred. The caucus results will tell the tale.