Santorum declares a tired war on New York Times

You'd have to think that Rick Santorum is wearing down from his saintly campaign grind when he accuses a New York Times reporter of bullshit. It escaped from his lips on Fox News when he said the reporter misquoted him as saying Mitt Romney was the "worst Republican in the country to put up against Obama." (By other accounts, Santorum did say that, folks.)

Since McRick and I each grew up in coal mining towns I would say, however, that having lived among the miners, the choice of words to describe the paper could have been a lot more ethnically colorful - particularly at the Kosciusko Hall on Saturday nights.

So here we go. If you can't whip the guy ahead of you in the primaries, you run against the New York Times. Republicans have been doing it since the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But Santorum takes this pandering to the illiterati a step farther by insisting: "If you haven't cursed out a New York Times reporter during a campaign, you're not really a good Republican, is the way I look at it."

By the first day of summer, real Republicans will have to sign a Santorum pledge that they are real Republicans by cursing that paper in Manhattan. Not even Grover Norquist's no-tax pledges can top that when you're looking for authenticity - which is sort of scarce these days in the GOP front lines. Who will be the first really real Republican to sport a t-shirt that says, "Don't blame me. I'm a really real Republican."?

Too bad they weren't available when McRick spoke at the Summit County Lincoln Day dinner. A lot of folks, from the chairman on down, would be wearing them today.