i spent much of this morning driving around central pennsylvania. it was one of those crack-o-dawn days, when i had to wake up before the sun rose to drive to a hearing in the middle of nowhere.
anyway, i got to listen to all these little NPR affiliates in the middle of the state. i say "all these" because it seems like whenever i got a good signal from one, i would drive around a mountain and lose it. so i ended up listening to quite a few different channels, interspersed with a bit of static.
although the national morning news was the same, the local news was quite different once i left the WHYY (the philadelphia NPR station) behind. one of the main local stories on all of the non-WHYY stations was a speech given by rick santorum yesterday in harrisburg. the radio stations excerpted two different recordings from his speech. i'm doing this from memory, i can't find the speech online, but here's the rough gist of the two santorum quotes:
1. rick said that we are not at war with a country like iraq or afghanistan or an action like terrorism, but rather against islam. or a strain of islam.
2. rick said that distinctions like those between shia and sunni, secular and religious have no bearing on this war.
even though the two quotes were played in succession, there seemed to be no awareness that they directly contradicted one another. it seems elementary that if this is a war against a strain of islam, then who is secular and who is religious is an important distinction to make.
it's also remarkable that the quotes were only playing in the middle (i.e. the "red") parts of the state. why didn't WHYY pick up on it as well?
finally, i was struck by how rick santorum actually managed to articulate a worse middle eastern policy than the president. honestly, i thought bush was the low-water mark when it came to bone-headed policies for the region. i wouldn't have thought you could do worse than him. but i guess i overestimated santorum. rick is always full of surprises.
