The residents of Havana and the Cuban people who live elsewhere in the prison island are anxiously awaiting the visit next week of Pope Benedict XVI. It is the first papal visit to Cuba in a decade, and those who most look forward to it are Cuba’s beleaguered dissidents, who have bravely sought to peacefully organize against the dictatorship. For their efforts, they have regularly been sent to serve lengthy prison terms in conditions of utter brutality.

It is their hope, above all, as the leading dissident doctor Oscar Biscet wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, that it is “a unique opportunity for the leader of the Catholic Church to leverage his considerable prestige and influence to support the oppressed and help the Cuban people claim our liberty and establish democracy.”  Indeed, it is such an opportunity. But the question is simply this: Will the pope avail himself of this opportunity, or will he pass it by, content instead with the decision of Cuba’s rulers to suddenly allow the official Catholic Church to exist and Cuban Catholics to openly proclaim their faith?

Dr. Biscet knows what the stakes are from personal experience.  He had been in prison himself since 1999, and was released last March as a result of the intercession on his behalf of the Church leadership in Rome. Cuban prisons, Biscet wrote, include the following practices:

The prison system in Cuba flagrantly violates the minimum requirements for prisoner care established by the United Nations. During my years in prison, I personally witnessed prisoners left for 12-24 hours with their hands and feet handcuffed behind their backs, stripped naked in groups without any regard for human modesty, tortured physically and psychologically with tasers, beaten to death for requesting basic medical attention, and kept for months in cells without ventilation, natural light, drinkable water or restroom facilities.

As a result of writing that article, Havana’s secret police turned up at Biscet’s home, summoning him to report to their headquarters.  By the time this is posted, Biscet may well again be back in prison, out of the way in order to prevent the pope from being bombarded by such reports that besmirch the regime. As Biscet noted, personal ruin is most often what “the regime inflicts on anyone who offers an alternative voice.” In still Communist Cuba, freedom of speech is a luxury to be practiced only by the bravest and most outspoken.

When Fidel Castro took power in 1959, Cuba quickly made it known that religion and its open practice was to be banned. As in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, churches and synagogues were closed, and the faithful had to practice in secret. Fidel Castro, brought up in Jesuit schools, proclaimed Marxism as the only public faith, as religion was scorned as not scientific and antithetical to Marxism-Leninism. Now, with Communism almost collapsed everywhere, recognizing the Church as a legitimate body allows the regime breathing space in tough times, giving the oppressed populace removal of a grievance. The Castro brothers hope will allow them to stay in power.

Hence, the regime no longer preaches the once popular doctrine of “liberation theology,” meant to offer support to a regime-friendly religious façade that helped the rulers proclaim to the gullible abroad that some religion was allowed to exist.

So now, Fidel and Raul Castro say they are Catholic. Officially, the pope is coming to Cuba to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the patroness saint of Cuba, Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, a Caridad. The regime has announced that a new seminary is opening, as well as a Catholic cultural center. But all these actions taken by the regime, as Conrad Black wrote,  mean that any “celebration of the triumph of any…redemptionist and expiatory impulse would be, to say the least, premature.”

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Monday’s New York Times ran an op-ed by none other than Peter Beinart, a man who is quickly becoming the poster boy for the anti-Israel movement. I have written about Beinart before. You can find my earlier columns here and here and finally here.  So, in case you didn’t guess, I am not what you would call a fan.

But nothing so far exemplifies his hubris and the simplicity of his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian issue than Monday’s article, excerpted from his forthcoming book, which obviously the New York Times hopes to make a super best-seller.

Beinart’s short essay reveals the heart of his argument, which is quickly endearing himself to the anti-Israeli American left in particular. Pretending to support a two-state solution, Beinart advances his thesis that Israel’s pro-settler policy is the reason that Palestinians have turned against the Jewish state. Of course, if the current settlements were the cause of their hatred of Israel, he would have to explain why throughout the decades they have consistently turned down every offer made by Israel that would have led to two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian. And he would have to explain why, from day one of Israel’s creation, the Arab states and the Palestinian residents, led by the Nazi ally Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, pledged to oppose the Jewish state to the last drop of their blood. In their eyes, any amount of territory given to the Jews was a settlement that had to be destroyed.

To advance his agenda, Beinart now argues for a strategy of boycotts and disinvestment not in all of Israel, but just in products coming from Jewish settlers who live anywhere in the West Bank. Of course, such a boycott could never work, and no one but Beinart favors it. It would quickly become a boycott of anything made in Israel, since no one buying any Israeli products in fact knows where it is made in Israel and by whom. It also legitimizes the very idea of boycotting Israel, but this time to be carried out in the name of saving Israel from itself. This is, to use a Jewish term, a good example of chutzpah gone wild.

But because his piece was published in the Times and given its imprimatur, it has more importance than had he published it, for example, in the weekly Jewish liberal paper The Forward. That is why it immediately received an unprecedented response from Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren. Writing on his Facebook page, Oren posted the following statement:

Peter Beinart’s call (“To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements,” New York Times, 3.19.12) places him well beyond the Israeli mainstream, the moderate left, and the vast majority of Israelis who care about peace. The call for boycotting all products made by Israeli communities outside of Jerusalem and beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines is supported only by a marginal and highly radical fringe. Beinart’s position, moreover, absolves the Palestinians of any responsibility for the current situation, including their rejection of previous peace offers, their support for terror, and their refusal to negotiate with Israel for the past three years. By reducing the Palestinians to two-dimensional props in an Israeli drama, Beinart deprives them of agency and indeed undermines his own thesis. Without an active Palestinian commitment to a two-state solution–irrespective of boycotts–the peace Beinart seeks cannot be achieved.

Oren nails it, and is correct to point out that Beinart’s position is not that of “liberal” Jews, but in fact, the position of a “radical fringe.” And by putting all the blame on the lack of peace on Israel alone, as Beinart does, he reveals without seeming to realize it that in fact he is echoing the position of Palestinian opponents of Israel, not that of Israel’s friends.

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I received it from UPS half an hour ago, and I’m thrilled. I’m talking, of course, about the new iPad, which I ordered online from Apple the moment it was announced. You’ve read about it everywhere else, so why not here at PJM? Fortunately, I was not among those who got the iPad 2. I bit my tongue, and resisted spending the dough. Now I am very, very happy.

As you have undoubtedly read elsewhere, the new iPad, which they should have differentiated by calling it the iPad 3 or the iPad HD, lives up to all the hype. So based on a half hour’s experimentation, here’s why I think it is deserving of all the plaudits.

1: It’s all about the resolution. When you compare the screen on a previous iPad to the new one, you can see the difference immediately. It is so sharp that just as they claim, it’s as good or better than most 1080p HD TVs. Photos I have taken and synced to it from my computer are so sharp that it defies the imagination. Goodbye forever to printing one’s photos. If you want to see them, or show them to others, pull out the iPad.

According to Apple, the screen resolution is 2048 x 1536! Compare that to your computer monitor or your TV. It also has a quad-core graphics processor, so it is also much faster.

The same goes for reading newspapers, magazines and e-books. Up till now,  I have been reading books  on the new Kindle. Except for the problem of reading on vacation in the sun — the new iPad cannot escape the same problem one has with viewing an iPhone display outdoors — the print is so sharp on the I PAD that reading is a pleasure, and one can now do it without computer eye strain. And, as with a Kindle, you can change the font to your specification.

The greatest advantage to the iPad is for reading magazines. If you subscribe to many magazines, as I do, the sub usually arrives between four days to two weeks after it has been out. Most magazines give you access to the entire issue if you are a subscriber, and with the iPad, I download the issue the day it is posted and have the entire contents when it is fresh.

2: It maintains the long battery life of the second generation iPad, close to 10 hours without the necessity to recharge. Yes, it is a tad heavier than the earlier model, but still much lighter than the first generation. So in my case, holding it to read, I can feel the difference in weight immediately. That makes it much easier to read in bed at night.

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When J Street cries “McCarthyism,” you can be certain of one thing. They don’t have any good argument for the case they are presenting.

The person whom they charge with “McCarthyism,”– the familiar refrain of the Left used against anyone who makes an argument they disagree with — is Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens. Last week he penned one of his most incisive and cutting weekly columns, a sharp critical take on President Obama’s claim that he can be depended upon to have Israel’s back.

He describes the president’s “disingenuousness when it comes to Israel.” He did it particularly well, more so than others. But what got J Street’s goat — on the eve of its national conference next week — was that he took information from the president’s major supporter, journalist Peter Beinart, who — as Stephens writes — was a liberal hawk “who has reinvented himself as a liberal scourge of present-day Israel and mainstream Zionism.”

He uses the figures Beinart brings up in his book — a group of “far left Chicago Jews” — as a group that was important to Obama as he developed views about the state of Israel. In his recent New Yorker editorial, David Remnick used the same group to make much the same point. Calling Obama a “philo-Semite,” he bases his judgement on what he says on the fact that his “earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews,” who Netanyahu thinks are “the wrong kind of Jew.”

Identifying them, he calls the late Rabbi Arnold Wolf a man “most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes.” A good man, indeed. What irks Remnick and J Street is that in Stephens’ column, the WSJ writer calls Wolf something akin to the opposite. Rather than just a supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr., which is what Remnick calls Wolf, Stephens reports that he was a supporter of the extremist Black Panther Party in the 60s, a man whose group met with the PLO when it backed terrorism, and an opponent of building the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Stephens went on to reveal that the other Jews on the list were all left-wing activists. In other words, the “kind of Jew” that American leftists all like.

So, what we see is that it is fine to single out these people when the list of their names can be used as a mechanism to praise Obama and to get American Jews to back him. It is not alright to use these same people’s names when their political views are more clearly brought to light, and are used to show the disingenuousness of Obama’s claim of having a pro-Israel point of view.

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I have fond memories of the old golden days of The New Republic from the early 1970s and especially through the 1980s, when the stale old liberalism was becoming very apparent and the need developed for a way to cut through its verbiage and assumptions. Under the helm of Marty Peretz, TNR slowly but surely moved away from the old shibboleths, breaking new ground and antagonizing the dwindling old liberal/left community. Peretz learned the lesson the hard way. As a funder of something called the New Politics Conference held in Chicago, he witnessed its takeover by extremist black radicals who quickly humiliated its white sponsors and unleashed a surge of old-fashioned antisemitism.

Peretz brought in a slew of independent-minded and brilliant editors and writers, including the then-young Leon Wieseltier as chief of the back books section, and journalists like Mort Kondracke, Charles Krauthammer (yes, he left medicine to go first to work on Walter Mondale’s campaign and then to TNR) Michael Kinsley, Roger Rosenblatt, Fred Barnes, James Glassman, Steve Wasserman, Charles Lane, and many, many others. The list of names could go on and on. All of them have gone on to prominence and distinction in the field of journalism.

Before long, TNR took positions that furiously antagonized its liberal base. In the ’80s, during the Central American wars in which the Reagan administration took on the fight against the Communist revolutionaries in El Salvador and Nicaragua, TNR stood with those opposed to the Sandinistas and the FSLN. Indeed, at a critical moment, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Marty Peretz, openly sided with Nicaragua’s contras, the very armed resistance to the Sandinistas that the liberal community had painted as a bunch of fascist goons. That editorial position enraged many of its editors, who signed a letter to the editor protesting the magazine’s editorial. Before long, whenever TNR took a position opposite to that taken by most self-proclaimed liberals, a new saying emerged in Washington D.C. circles, “even the liberal New Republic says….”

The magazine also soon distinguished itself as the leading journalistic supporter of Israel. Its editors, led by Peretz, understood the centrality to peace and a future in the Middle East that distinguished Israel as a light among nations. That too, as time passed, would enrage so many on the liberal-left, whose leaders turned their back on Israel as they grew to distance themselves from the Jewish state, whose policies they thought had become too conservative.

On a personal level, TNR started my venture into journalism. As a trained academic historian, I never hoped to write for any magazine, least of all one like TNR. One day, out of the blue, Peretz phoned me, having read something I wrote in the very left-wing Nation. He liked it, he said, and asked me to consider writing something for the magazine whose helm he had recently taken. Over the years, I wrote scores of pieces for them. The magazine sent me to Nicaragua on two different occasions to cover the Sandinista takeover. I wrote about Cold War issues and the pro-Communists in the peace movement during the years of peace marches and pressure for unilateral disarmament at home from the Left, and wrote the first piece, with my friend Sol Stern, reevaluating the Rosenberg case.

That 1979 article became one of its all-time best sellers, and led to the eventual book I wrote with the late Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File. The article, in fact, would never have seen the light of day had it not been for Peretz understanding its importance. It was supposed to have been a featured piece in The New York Times Magazine, but was spiked (after actually being printed) by the late A.M. Rosenthal, who feared offending Judge Irving R. Kaufman, the Rosenberg case judge, who then sat on the very court that judged press cases and before which the paper had one pending.

Now, the announcement that it has a new owner and editor-in-chief appears on top of TNR’s web page, written by the new boss himself, Chris Hughes, the roommate at Harvard of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s co-creator. I do not know Hughes, but reading his own remarks, and reading about him on various sites, I — an old admirer of TNR — am not too optimistic about its future. He will keep it, he says, a “journal of interpretation and opinion,” and pledges “rigorous reporting and analysis” of today’s very important stories. As an internet pioneer, he wants to make it a magazine that in the long run will be primarily read on a Tablet, which is how, in fact, I now read most magazines. He knows that is journalism’s future, and he is clearly right about this.

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By Ron Radosh and Allis Radosh

There were a few surprises at Monday night’s AIPAC meeting. Throughout the previous two days, AIPAC spokesmen regularly championed the bi-partisan nature of Congress’s resolve to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but by the end of the evening the differences in their approach and resolve were apparent, and so were the sympathies of the more than 13,000 attendees.

First up was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He laid out the many ways in which Iran has acted as a dangerous and terrorist rogue state, and noted that while the Obama administration may share the common goal of stopping Iran from going nuclear, they had not come close to achieving success.It was the failure of Obama’s diplomacy from the beginning of his term that had forced Congress to act and would do so again.

The reason, McConnell said, was that the administration’s policy contained a “critical flaw.” At first, the Obama team tried to negotiate with Iran by extending an open hand in friendship, but two different offers and deadlines to meet with their leaders in September and December of 2009 came and went with no results. Iran just continued to work on getting their bomb. As Congress grew impatient, it initiated a sanctions policy which the president opposed, eventually reluctantly signing it.Congress then handed the president an additional tool “he did not seek or ask for,” that of sanctions against the banks doing business with Iran.

But now, according to McConnell, the president’s current error is to rely too heavily on sanctions alone.  To say “all options are on the table,” McConnell said, might be a good talking point, but it is not a policy. Threats alone, he noted, “have lost their intended purpose.” A red line only works if the definition of that line is clearly spelled out and what the painful consequences will be if crossed. In light of the president’s reluctance to do it, McConnell laid out his plan:

If at any time the intelligence community presents the Congress with an assessment that Iran has begun to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, or has taken a decision to develop a nuclear weapon — consistent with protecting classified sources and methods — I will consult with the President and joint congressional leadership and introduce before the Senate an authorization for the use of military force. This authorization, if enacted, will ensure the nation and the world that our leaders are united in confronting Iran, and will undermine the perception that the U.S. is wounded or retreating from global responsibilities.

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After his first round of meetings with President Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed that “Israel must have the ability always to defend itself, by itself,” and must remain the “master of its fate.” Continuing, the Israeli prime minister noted: “When it comes to Israel’s security, Israel has the right, the sovereign right, to make its own decisions” — a clear indication that Netanyahu was saying it is up to Israel, not any American president, to decide when Iran has crossed the “red line” after which no option other than force will remove an Iranian nuclear threat.

As journalist Eli Lake pointed out today, the two sides oppose each other and it is rather difficult to see how they will come to any serious mutual agreement. Lake writes that Obama’s goal “will be to assure the Israel prime minister that the United States will use force to delay Iran’s nuclear program if the current round of sanctions don’t work,” while “all the while, Netanyahu’s objective will be to avoid having to make a direct commitment to the president not to order his jets to bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.”

The issue is what the trigger is after which Israel’s leaders believe they have no option available except that of striking Iran. The Obama administration seems to believe that it will occur when Iran already has a weapon, while Israel’s leaders seem to indicate the red line will be way before when Iran already has all the components ready to put together. As Lake puts it: “The Israelis seek to destroy Iran’s ability to manufacture an atomic weapon, whereas President Obama has pledged only to stop Iran from making a weapon.”

To Israel, the time to act is now; to the current American president, it seems the time to act has not yet arrived. How, one wonders, can these two very different assessments be made compatible?

In this context, the speech to AIPAC this morning by Executive Director Howard Kohr assumes great importance. A well-known Democrat with ties to the White House, Kohr — while trying to put the best face on the president’s speech the previous day — presented a tough message to the executive branch.

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By Ron Radosh and Allis Radosh

An issue hovering in the air at this year’s annual AIPAC policy conference is their traditional stance of strict bipartisan support for Israel. From its founding in the early 1950s, AIPAC has stressed that Israel is helped the most when it has the support of both Republicans and Democrats. Being in the pocket of either party has been seen as something to be avoided at all costs. The group always tries to give leading figures from both major political parties equal time, in both plenary sessions and the so-called “outbreak” smaller sessions on various issues concerning foreign policy.

But bipartisanship can be more challenging in presidential election years. This quickly surfaced during the conference’s first panel on foreign policy when former Rep. Jane Harman spoke on a panel with Liz Cheney, a former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration and Dick Cheney’s daughter.  As our reporter Bridget Johnson noted earlier, Jane Harman argued that Israel should not be allowed to become a political football, but as Cheney countered, in her eyes no president has done more to hurt Israel than Barack Obama. While Harmon proclaimed that the president would never allow Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb, Cheney pointed to America’s abysmal record at predicting other country’s nuclear capabilities.

The opening salvo between Harman and Cheney set the stage for the appearance of President Barack Obama. By now PJM readers have seen our report, and perhaps read the entire text of his speech as well. What is striking is that when Cheney ended her comments by saying that she hoped 2012 would produce a new president with a firmer pro-Israel policy, the hall broke out in loud and sustained applause — applause that obviously came from many Democrats as well as Republicans.

Given that response, perhaps it was not too much of a surprise to find that the response of the AIPAC crowd towards the president was respectful, but rather lukewarm. There were no boos, unlike last year — when Obama talked about Israel having to agree to the 1967 (actually 1948) borders — but no great outpouring of gratitude either for what he said.

Many of the AIPAC members we spoke to after the speech said it was essentially a campaign talk — an effort to cement the usually uniform Jewish vote for the Democrats, especially critical in a state like Florida where a small drop in Jewish support could mean a loss of this vital state in the Democratic column on election day.

What was most apparent were not the major lines meant to gather applause from the crowd — the president, for example, saying that he had Israel’s back and would always stand with it — but what he did not address.  An astute analysis came from Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog, who pointed out that despite not urging Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in the interest of peace — something he did consistently his first few years in office and last year at AIPAC:

Even more significant was the fact that despite his repeated vows to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, there was little indication that Obama is prepared to make the leap from talking about the danger to actually doing something. His call for continued efforts towards negotiations on the issue undermined all the hard line rhetoric intended to appease wavering Jewish Democrats. Though his campaign will spin this speech as more proof that Obama has “Israel’s back,” Iran’s leaders may read it very differently and assume they are free to go on building their weapon with little fear the U.S. really is contemplating the use of force.

To put it a bit differently, the devil as usual is in the details, and the president was not about to spell those out, preferring instead to say the things meant to win his audience and American Jews at large to the Democratic column, while remaining vague about the “red line” Iran cannot be allowed to cross.

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In today’s Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan has posted a blog post that is so delusional and so over the line that it goes far beyond anything he has yet written in the many tirades he has posted against Israel.  In the course of the post, he argues the following:

First, “a Third World War based on religion” is most likely “inevitable.” The cause of that war will most likely not be the mullahs and theocrats of Iran, which might indeed be the case if its leaders succeed in obtaining nuclear weapons, but rather the Jewish state of Israel!

Second, he actually says — putting himself in the shadow of dozens of notorious anti-Semites from Father Coughlin to Gerald L.K.Smith in the 1930s, to Pat Buchanan and his supporters in present day America — that the media in the United States is controlled by Jewish interests, and hence is friendly to Israel. He writes that the Israeli government can rally “its media outlets (like Fox, and the Washington Post),” as well as “a key part of the Democratic fundraising machinery to side entirely with Israel against the US president.” I bet you did not realize that Fox, the Washington Post, and the Democratic National Committee were all controlled by Israel and its lobby!

Third, and most serious of all, he concludes his article with the truly bizarre charge that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (who, he earlier writes, is beholden to his “neo-fascist base”) is “in league with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich,[and] will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. [my emphasis] And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.”

Let us parse that paragraph for a brief moment. He does not write they will try to get Obama removed from office by a presidential campaign, in which the citizenry might heed their call and elect one of them our president if successful, but that they will try to “get rid of” him in a “lethal” way. Is this just bad writing, or is Sullivan suggesting in some underhanded manner that Netanyahu and his controlled Republican candidates are trying somehow to assassinate or shoot him?

His article is filled with other major gaffes. He takes a news analysis in the New York Times and accuses it of minimizing “the potentially catastrophic global consequences of an Israeli-initiated war against another Muslim nation.” The story is just one person’s analysis, not an official document.

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There is a reason that the United Automobile Workers and its troops are urging its Michigan members to vote Tuesday in the crossover Michigan primary, and to cast their vote not for Barack Obama, but for Rick Santorum. They understand, as evidently many conservatives and Republicans do not comprehend, that Santorum as the Republican nominee would be nothing but a wonderful gift for the Democratic Party.

In an election year in which by all measurable standards Barack Obama should be toast, and when his major policy “achievement” of ObamaCare is detested by the public in all the polls, he is ahead in the same polls when pitted against any of the current crop of Republican candidates and gaining strength with every passing day. And even with rising gas prices — which of course will fall by November — and high unemployment, it is more than likely that the current occupant of the White House will indeed have a second term in office. If Rick Santorum is the nominee, it is a certainty that Obama will win.

Certainly, one can admire a great deal of Santorum’s firmness in standing for what he sincerely believes, as even Joe Klein admirably points out. True, Klein writes, he has been over the top, especially arguing that America today is more under the rule of Satan than in any of its past history. But, as Klein writes:

When you leave Hitler and Satan aside, there is something admirable about Santorum’s near Tourettic insistence on bringing up issues no one else wants to talk about. His position on education — that parents need to spend a lot more time supervising their children’s schooling — draws stifled groans from the overworked parents in his audiences, but he’s right: parents know best how their children learn. His emphasis on the importance of intact families is undoubtedly correct as well; every major study since the 1960s has shown the disaster that results from out-of-wedlock births. Even Santorum’s use of prenatal testing raises uncomfortable issues for many people. It was a sonogram that helped determine that the Santorums’ son Gabriel needed microsurgery in the womb to clear his bladder. Rick and Karen decided to fight for Gabriel’s life, which nearly cost Karen her own, and they passionately embraced the child during his two hours on earth. They have spent the past three years caring for their daughter Isabella, whose genetic defect, trisomy 18, is an early-death sentence.

And, as our colleague Michael Ledeen has reminded us, Santorum has a strong understanding of the major threat Iran is to the national security of the entire West, not just Israel and the United States. And he had that comprehension before anyone else, when saying this out loud was not particularly popular. As Ledeen writes:

Mr. Santorum believes the United States must lead the struggle for freedom throughout the world, on grounds of morality and national security, which he believes go hand in hand. He does not like the drift away from leadership and engagement in that struggle, especially under President Obama.

For these reasons, I would hope that if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee and somehow wins the presidency, he would appoint Santorum head of the National Security Council and John Bolton secretary of State. The two would be a strong and tough team that could change our disastrous foreign policy and finally develop one that would gain respect for our country throughout the world. But such a comprehension does not mean Santorum can win the White House in a general election.

The point has been well made by Kathleen Parker, who writes:

He’s so far out of step with the majority of Americans that he can’t hope to win the votes of moderates and independents so crucial to victory in November. The Republican Party’s insistence on conservative purity, meanwhile, will result in the cold comfort of defeat with honor and, in the longer term, potential extinction.

You can agree with Santorum’s total opposition to abortions for women in any case whatsoever, but if you look at how so many Republican women bolted in anger against the GOP when informed last week of the proposed Virginia legislation that would have forced vaginal insertion of a probe into a woman’s body, you get an indication of how national adoption of Santorum’s policies would create a storm. As Parker wrote:

When did Republicans, who supposedly believe in less government intervention, begin thinking that invading a person’s body against her will was remotely acceptable?

The debate with a Santorum candidacy would focus on his social views, and be about contraception, Catholic views of birth control, state enforced vaginal penetration of women’s bodies before abortion, and generally about Santorum himself. Forgotten will be the economy, jobs, unemployment, and foreign policy. The Democrats will simply make sure of this. Democrats will charge, falsely of course, that Republicans are campaigning against birth control, and to bolster their charge, they will pull out of the hat Santorum’s own complicated and difficult-to-understand views that he has expressed in the past. As Parker says, just look at the math. Sixty-seven percent of women are Democrats or independents, and more of them vote than men.

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