Post Super Tuesday withdrawal symptoms

AS THE WOEBEGONE 2012 CLASS OF Republican Warriors stumbled across the Super Tuesday finish line, we continued to be told that our freedom was at stake in the hands of,

President Obama. It wasn't one of those Bartlett Quotations liberty-or-death Patrick Henry warnings - the 2012 Class's rhetoric isn't that profound. In the modern world, freedom is the buzz word for Obamacare and at some point Mitt Romney - if he is the nominee - will have to go lectern to lectern with Barack on national TV to offer the second line to his argument of why his Massachusetts health-care plan is so much different than the current plan.

Rick Santorum, when he wasn't preparing everyone for a secure path to the heavenly gates, also believes we are all the President's prisoners. Referring to the wide curse of government health care, he told a Steubenville audience as much, declaring: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom. Once the government has control of your life, they've got you."

Meanwhile. here are some footnotes that didn't make it to the front page:

(1)When Romney carried Summit County, it reminded us of the straw poll - ballyhooed as the largest in the state, for God's sake - taken at the GOP Lincoln Day Dinner here where Santorum was the supernova speaker. The honored guest won that one with 74 pct. of the vote. We still wonder why the local party made such a fuss over Santorum, but these days we wonder about a lot of things. But it is true that Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine is getting his 15 minutes of national attention for tagging along with Santorum.

(2)Just when you thought the Obama haters couldn't burrow more deeply into the muck, a federal judge in Montana emailed a purported joke that suggested Obama was the child of a mother impregnated by a dog. The state's chief federal judge!!! Responding to calls for his resignation, Judge Richard Cebull, conceded that the joke was racist, but said he only sent it to others because he was "anti-Obama."

(3Down in Laurens County, S. Car, the county GOP has set up new critreria for a candidate to appear on the primary ballot., Candidates will have to swear that they never had pre-marital sex and will never again look at pornographic stuff. The party had first asked the candidates to sign a pledge - signed pledges are quite fashionable in the Republican pure-at-heart schemes these days - but backed off because it might have had legal problems.

I particularly like this part of the requirement: You must be faithful to your wife, cannot marry anyone of the same gender nor support same-sex civil unions. The candidates will be screened for moral purity by a three-member committee. Clearly, this would have been a serious problem for ex-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who had an adulterous fling with a mistress in Argentina while explaining his absences as hikes on the Appalachian Trail. You might have heard, he will have no such morality problems with Fox News, which just signed him to be a political analyst.

(4)And finally, Fox's Chris Wallace has told us that Fox's health insurance plan indeed covers contraceptives. But didn't Bill Reilly, who once resolved a sex harassment suit with a big out-of-court financial settlement, rant that the entire Sandra Fluke uproar was in fact nothing more than a Democratic plot? He said what?! ? You bet he did.

When only one ear hears a hearing

I'M A WHITE GUY. Always have been since birth. But I've always been put off by so many white guys, pejoratively speaking, that I've met over the years who use the color of their skin as Exhibit A of swaggering superiority over various other human hues. As if that isn't bad enough, I can also report there are a lot of swaggering white guys in the land who are deeply into patriarchy predating the Dark Ages.

That was easily confirmed, by Rep. Darrell Issa's hokey male-dominated congressional hearing on separation of church and state but was really all about contraceptives. Issa is a native Clevelander, the richest man in Congress (estimated $450 million), politically fashioned by the accident of his gender and culture, and submissive only to the dark climate of his remarkably conservative district in Southern California. (Could he possibly be one of Gov. Kasich's California Wackadoodles, too? Naw. Too white , well off and Republican to be criticized.)

One day earlier this week, Issa sat as the committee chairman for his inquiry that paraded a panel of witnesses carefully selected to ignore the certain argument against his premise that contraceptives are bad business. He even barred a woman law student from testifying for the other side. There's that side of democracy, too.

Here are the carefully chosen enablers of Issa's dense patriarchal premise that men know better about everything: Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Yeshiva University; Dr. Craig Mitchell, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Bishop William E. Lori, representing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Matthew Harrison, President of Missouri Lutheran Synod, (who claimed conscience martyrdom by the Feds), Prof. Ben Mitchell, Union University (evangelical).

You might want to bet $10,000 that all were against abortion and a lot of other bothersome female stuff.

Dissenters would have had more luck walking barefoot over a stretch of hot coals.

But wait: That one misrepresented hearing drew a coast-to-coast response from women who won't let anybody forget their outrage. And we're told they outnumber the white guys. After all, it is 2012.

As I keep insisting: Republicans, you have a problem.