I realize someone posted this in a Page earlier today… but I’m still flummoxed that a leading candidate for the nomination for President of the US could say the following in the year 2011 and it not be seen as, well, so far out on the limb that something is really wrong:

Santorum says Obama agenda not “based on Bible”

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum challenged President Barack Obama’s Christian beliefs on Saturday, saying White House policies were motivated by a “different theology.”

A devout Roman Catholic who has risen to the top of Republican polls in recent days, Santorum said the Obama administration had failed to prevent gas prices rising and was using “political science” in the debate about climate change.

Obama’s agenda is “not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,” Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.

When asked about the statement at a news conference later, Santorum said, “If the president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian.”

But Santorum did not back down from the assertion that Obama’s values run against those of Christianity.

“He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I’m not going to,” Santorum told reporters.

[…]

At a campaign appearance in Florida last month, Santorum declined to correct a voter who called Obama, a Christian, an “avowed Muslim.”

Santorum told CNN after that incident, “I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them, and the president’s a big boy, he can defend himself.”

[…]

Essentially, Santorum is implying that unless the President of the US expressly institutes “values” in line with fundamentalist American Christianity then the President is somehow not properly executing the duties of the office of the President.

That’s just a straight-up theocratic model of governance.

Oh, and on top of that Santorum directly assigns the responsibility for managing gasoline prices to the office of the President. And here these Tea Partiers whine and whine about “command” economics! Clue to the tea partiers - gasoline prices are where they are becauseof the “free market”. Yes, really.