(Liberal) Alan Colmes: Rick Santorum took dead baby home to 'play with it'

Examiner ^ | 1/2/2012 | Joe Newby,

[tobyhill]

Liberal talk show host Alan Colmes sunk to new a new low when he said on Fox News that former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum took his deceased baby home to 'play with it.'

Noting that the GOP has "speed-dated" every other candidate, Colmes said voters should "get a load" of what he called the "crazy things" Santorum has said and done.

"Like taking his two-hour old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple hours so his other children would know it was real, I mean..."

At this point, Fox News contributor Rich Lowry tore into Colmes, calling his statement a "cheap shot."

Lowry lambasted Colmes for "mocking" the death of Santorum's child and said it was beneath the liberal talker, sometimes known as "Skeletor" among some conservatives

[HiTech RedNeck]

I am not Catholic, but she appears to me to be a believing Christian, and sincere about it. Is Michelle Obama of any religious persuasion at all?

[MamaB]

My mother's dad passed away in 1926 at the age of 56, my dad in 1984 at the age of 82 and my mom died in 2007 just 3 months short of her 103rd birthday. Wish I had known my grandfather because my mom sure did love him. Her mom died in 1969 and she was a few years short of 100. You want to know something else odd about this family. My grandmother lost a daughter, my mom lost a daughter and I have lost a daughter. I think that goes back for several more generations.

[Tennessean4Bush]

Alan Colmes needs the love of God to touch him.

[MamaB]

Yes, just like a lot more people

[silverleaf]

“Letters to Gabriel” was written by Karen Santorum in 1998.

http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Gabriel-Karen-Garver-Santorum/dp/1568145284

Creeps from the MEdia mining this book for dirt is hardly a case of Rick Santorum “bringing this (his child’s death) to the public square”

[Chunga]

Which comment made you chuckle?

[Ann Archy]

Colmes is a VILE, EVIL REPTILE!! I turn off Fox when he is on.

[Ann Archy]

“Go eat a cricket, Alan”!! PERFECT!! Made me chuckle in this awful thread.

[Ann Archy]

I just watched the video and Rick was WAAAAYYYYY TOO NICE about what that VILE Alan Colmes said!!!<P.Hey Sean, Hey Rick.....Colmes is PURE EVIL...stay away from him....SHUN HIM.

[TigersEye]

Good grief! Did anyone see what our resident reptile posted on another thread about this?

Mariner to 2nd amendment mama

Now YOU, and only YOU gets to decide who a true conservative is?
And because I think it's freaky sick to take home a 20-week premmie...dead...to be cuddled, caressed and whispered to...overnight mind you, I'm the one that is not a "true conservative".

If not being a necrophile is not being conservative...I guess I fit that bill.

You and Ricky so value life that you worship the dead.

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[Reagan69]

Colmes was wrong to say this.

Santorum is still creepy.

[ballplayer]

Then the Dead baby came back to life,deformed yes, but alive and its name is Alan Colmes

[nuconvert]

Nowhere in the article you posted, did Santorum say that he “played with” the baby. The “played with” was Colmes’s despicable take on it. THAT’s what makes this so offensive. (Besides the fact that he would even bring up the death of a candidate’s baby to be used in a derogatory manner)

He’s a WORM.

[Fresh Wind]

I wonder if Mr. Colmes ever mocked John Edwards for getting on the slab and hugging his dead son (who died in a tragic auto accident), and using the story of that incident to further his political career?

[ejonesie22]

That boy needs some help...

[BTCM]

There’s liberals and then there’s sons of bitches. We all know Combs pedigree.

[Texas Eagle]

(comment removed by Texas Eagle in order to save mods the trouble)

[driftdiver]

Why should he keep the death of a member of his family secret?

[Scotswife]

I don’t have a clue....this is the first I heard of that.

Colmes certainly had the look of someone who thought they had “the goods” - and he was going to enjoy himself. He actually thought it was funny, until he had his fanny handed to him.

[darrellmaurina]

171 posted on Monday, January 02, 2012 11:33:29 PM by Mariner: “If anyone believes this would not, WILL NOT, destroy Santorum as a viable candidate for any office...they are not very knowledgeable in the political wars. MOST people think this is very weird...and that’ll be enough that they'll never vote for him.”

I absolutely do not want to defend Mariner.

However, I've been seeing comments like his pop up by other people on various Santorum-related threads. Unfortunately, while others who are political opponents of Santorum are saying similar things, this is the first case I've seen that people saying things like this have been attacked.

Don't get me wrong; I'm glad Mariner is being attacked. His comments need to be criticized — but so do those of a number of other people who have said similar things without eliciting similar responses.

The fact is that Mariner and other Freepers have a point. While Santorum’s actions with his infant child are consistent with a pro-life position, even if it's something I might not have chosen to do, Santorum’s actions **WILL** seem very strange to a lot of secular Americans. Mariner is right that it could easily turn into a nasty political attack — we already saw how Sarah Palin’s children turned into fodder for attacks on her.

I hope enough mothers who have had a miscarriage will say, “Hey, I'm not going to stand in judgment over a family's way of grieving” to keep this issue from damaging Santorum. Love for kids is not just a conservative value, and enough pro-choice liberals sincerely believe that these issues are between a woman and her doctor that many will respect the Santorum family's choice and method of grieving, even if they themselves would have aborted a pre-born baby or quickly gotten rid of the body of a stillborn infant.

The problem here is that those of us in the conservative pro-life movement are sometimes blinded to just how insidious the “culture of death” has become in America. Another Freeper had it right when saying that liberals hate large families. It goes beyond that — many liberals hate people like Santorum (and Sarah Palin) who believe it is their God-given obligation to protect the mentally handicapped and others who “take up resources.”

I wish it were only liberals who thought that way. When Mariner calls us “lifers,” it may indicate a fundamental disconnect from our values.

I don't want to say Mariner believes this, but there is a certain type of conservative who says (at least quietly) that rich parents have every right to do what they want with their own family, but if a poor parent doesn't have the resources to take care of a seriously handicapped child, the child would be better off not being born. Some of them will say that if a Catholic or evangelical Protestant hospital wants to provide free or low-cost medical care for parents who can't afford a neo-natal clinic, it's up to them, but the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for the cost to bring “undesirables” into the world.

That mentality has precedents in ancient Sparta and, more recently, in Nazi eugenics. It is, at root, the Planned Parenthood approach to improving the human race through family planning — it just uses conservative economic arguments to achieve that end rather than the more familiar liberal arguments.

Both the conservative and liberal versions of that argument are wrong, both are dangerous, and both need to be rebuked.

The pro-life movement's main enemies are in liberal political circles and that's where we need to focus our fire. Ayn Rand-style libertarian-leaning conservatives agree with us on enough things that it's usually best for both sides to grimace, agree to disagree, and vote for conservative candidates with whom we can agree on most things.

However, if we as conservatives ever succeed in driving European-style liberalism out of our country's political culture, we're going to have to deal with secular conservatives who simply do not share our pro-life values.

God is merciful, but He is also just. I sincerely hope that if we as conservatives ever win this culture war, people like Mariner will learn from their pro-life conservative colleagues and change their views. If they don't change their views, sooner or later they'll meet God's justice at His hands in eternity no matter what happens in the political realm.

Politically, we need to work with secular conservatives. We simply have no choice in modern American politics.

Theologically, God does not need Mariner, and he doesn't need me or anyone else. His justice will rule, and considering that America has killed more babies through eugenics than Hitler ever did, do we think God's justice is going to be any less severe with us than it was with Germany in the 1940s?

Let's think long and hard as conservatives how we're going to deal with this attack on Santorum. It has the potential to divide the conservative movement. We simply do not need and cannot afford that division this year. People like Mariner need to be told that Santorum’s family has a right to grieve the way they want, and that is consistent with libertarian ethics. I think that's a winning argument not only with libertarians but also with liberals.