Following up on Santorum.

I missed this column the first few times. But get a gander and what Ralph Reiland, columnist for The Tribune-Review, has to say about my favorite ex-Senator-who-was-voted-out-of-office-by a-huge-margin-because-no-one-liked-him.

In his new job, Rick Santorum is an employee of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank. "Our mission is to explore how the Judeo-Christian tradition applies to public policy," explains the center's president, M. Edward Whelan.

More specifically, Santorum will create and run EPPC's new "America's Enemies" program. "It's a stark name," says Santorum, "but we wanted to be candid about the fact that America really does have enemies and to point out that the nature of these enemies is much more complex than what people realize."

Note that we're dumb -- again. Just as we were moral pigmies when it came to understanding the gathering man-on-dog storm, now we're foreign policy pygmies when it comes to recognizing that America "really does have enemies" and that "the nature of these enemies is much more complex" than we realize.

"I was left after the election with a very clear sense of two things," explains Santorum. "Number one, the more I looked into the threat that confronts us, the more concerned I was about the gravity of that threat. And, number two, the more convinced I was that the American people didn't understand it."

He's "convinced," in short, that we just don't get it, don't see the "gravity," don't "understand it," just as too many of us didn't understand his make-em-suffer prescription for helping the poor. "Making people struggle a little bit," he maintained, "is not necessarily the worst thing."

Could not agree more.

I would like to point out that Santorum's latest frothy ejaculation on "the threat we're too dumb to face" is eeriely similar to some of the troll rants here at 2PJ.

Coincidence? I think not - just keeping tabs on the wingnuts of the world.