Careful: Santorum is traveling with a barf-bag

TO ALL OF MY loyal readers over the past four years I would like to offer you a peek at my yet to be written book called the Unmaking of a Wannabe President - Times Four. Subtitled, The Bridge to Nowhere that I Couldn't Make Up .

On page 73, George Stephanopoulos is interviewing Rick Santorum on ABC's Sunday morning TV show in which Santorum quotes a line from John F. Kennedy's speech to a group of Baptist ministers in Houston. Clearly pissed, Santorum repeats a line in the speech that went, "I believe in America where the separation of church and state is absolute." So far, George, an old pro, is with it. The network TV guys are nowhere near as tightly wound as, say, Rush Limbaugh.

Let's move on. Now, Santorum is explaining his response to an increasingly astonished Stephanopoulos, and you can understand why. The Heaven-but-not-earth candidate blurts that he wanted to throw up! Throw up? George is on the verge of freaking out. He questions Santorum on my next page. It was the first time in a million interviews that any presidential candidate had ever told the host that another politician, deceased or otherwise, used words that would make the interviewee throw up. (To be sure, some used good sense to restrain themselves when their guest was Donald Trump. But I will deal with The Donald in a later chapter.

By now, you can guess how manic Santorum was in the interview, hyperventilating, "to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?" I would pause here, readers, to suggest that Brother Santorum has been making his case in the public square for many months.

That was too graphic to exclude from my book. But now I must wonder whether Mitt Romney's exactly opposite happy-face remarks in expressing his love for Michigan will lose literary traction when he cheerfully declares that the state has the right height of trees and the streets are "just right". And that his wife has a couple of Cadillacs.

Santorum and Romney are colliding in Ohio, too, and I will be reserving a chapter for McMitt to tell us about how much he loves the buzzards of Hinckley. Or the Santorums of Hinckley? As for McRick, he is rumored to have chosen the top of the Humbard tower that still rises in Cuyahoga Falls to claim undisputed ascendance over his rivals. Such things are books made of.