Jim Hightower

Let's go spelunking in Rick Santorum's head. There, we can probe the inner sanctums of his brain and discover his deepest thoughts.

But once inside the Santorum skull we find that there are no deep thoughts at all in here – only acrid shallows of intolerant fundamentalist theology and the slippery moss of right-wing ideology. This explains why Santorum – whose name, after all, does derive from the same Latin root as sanctimonious – has now come out as the full-throated standard-bearer of the GOP's Christian extremist constituency.

Like an angry street preacher of pietistic correctness, he literally sees the devil at work in government policies, liberals generally, and Obama specifically. Obama's environmentalism, he cries out, is "phony theology," an attack on God's will that man has total dominion over Earth and all things within it. He rejects birth control as the devil's tool for promoting mass promiscuity, and he wails that government must stop funding prenatal checkups, for they're the invention of liberals who are trolling for babies to abort.

Indeed, the mere suggestion that an abortion might be legitimate for any reason whatsoever causes an eruption of fetid swamp gas from the narrow creases of Santorum's mind. Even a victim of vicious rape, he preaches, must view her pregnancy as "the gift of human life" and accept "what God has given to you." He devoutly intones that, although this is a fetus forced on her by the horror of rape, "It is her child."

Not only does such dogmatic fanaticism shape Santorum's world view, but it would also define his presidency. Forget Separation of Church and State – he says his own religious doctrine must be enthroned to help shape proper public policy. All hail Santorum: Theocrat-in-chief!