Eye of Mordor?

Poor, Rick Santorum. He can't seem to get anything right. Yesterday, this hit the news:

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been drawn to Iraq instead.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy classic “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

Let me say upfront that I never read any of the Tolkien books. I knew some guys in High School (25 years ago) who inhaled that stuff but it never really snagged me. Back then I wanted to be Chet Baker without the nasty heroin addiction.

In any case, the Tolkein fans the world over over at have begun to analyse Rick's literary reference. From Mother Jones:

Really, Santorum should have known better. By invoking LOTR, he was inviting the scrutiny of hordes of Tolkien fans, who, sure enough, are unleashing their fantasy-lit fury on him. First off, Santorum called it the Eye of Mordor, when it's really the Eye of Sauron.

And this was one of Rick's favorite books?