Next up: ‘Sundays With Santorum’ on Fox News

It wasn’t anywhere near as entertaining as Herman Cain’s announcement, nor as revealing as Michele Bachmann’s, nor as long-overdue as Rick Perry’s, but Rick Santorum definitely took the gold for moral grandiloquence as he officially ended his bid for the presidency Tuesday.

Though he failed to imbue the American people with Pokémon movie proverbs, Santorum did manage to hoist himself up next to such great men as the Great Emancipator with a deliberately gender- and sexual-orientation-specific claim that his campaign meant to celebrate how “all men are created equal,” and he heralded himself, his family, and his supporters as being transcendentally woven of the “strong moral fiber that makes us the moral enterprise that is America.”

Speaking of strong fibers, Santorum disappointed many by dispensing of his signature sweater vest during the announcement, although he did honor the “amazing sweater vest” by declaring it the “official wardrobe of the Santorum campaign.” The proud sweater manufacturers of Bemidji, Minn., surely appreciated Santorum’s shout-out, and there are rumors that the Smithsonian Museum has reserved a protective glass case for the Mister Rogers relic—right next to the Titanoboa monster snake exhibit.

Making what might have been the political understatement of the year, Santorum recalled that after being told “over and over” to “forget it; you can’t win,” he trudged on and eventually started winning, albeit “in a very different way—because we were touching hearts” and “raising issues that, frankly, a lot of people didn’t want to have raised.”

Even a simple Google search of the candidate brought tears to people’s eyes—some from belly-clenching laughter; others from disgust. But as the Frothman’s presidential campaign picked up steam, and as his moral indignation over women’s rights, gay rights and blah people went mainstream, his anti-recreational-sex message started attracting actual voters.

More than three million people in eleven states wanted “Petrus,” as Santorum was known by the Secret Service, to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. That’s three million predominantly-but-probably-not-purposefully celibate, old, white men who agreed that college is for snobs, that JFK induces vomiting, and that gay marriage is akin to terrorism.  The man who proudly warns his foes to “never underestimate the power of social issues” proved that, even in an election year dominated by the economy, anti-sex sells.

Some overconfident assholes ended up eating crow by falsely predicting that Santorum was running for president merely to rile the knuckle-draggers within Tea Party and replace Glenn Beck on Fox News.

While that may be the final result of Santorum’s run, his candidacy went further than many expected. His primary and caucus victories in the South and Midwest reaffirmed that conservative Republicans have maintained their decades-long political stranglehold on states with the whitest, poorest, least educated, most government dependent, mobile-home dwelling people in the country.

They supported Santorum in his presidential campaign this time around, and they’ll support him again in 2016. In the mean time, they’ll have to quench their thirst for bigotry, intolerance and misogyny by watching the Fox News Network’s upcoming “Sundays with Santorum” show.

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