By Jeffrey Page

Dear Newt, Forgive me, but the temptation to kick you when you’re down is just too great to resist.

We all knew a kid years ago who said that if he wasn’t picked for a stickball team he would take his stick and go home. In you, we have someone who has no stick – just a big mouth and a smart-ass attitude – and still insists on having things his way or else …

Or else you’ll go to the Republican convention with your pathetic showing in the primaries and demand to be heard. Once you’re up at the rostrum you’ll be sure to let America know – yet again – how smart you are, how perceptive, how talented, and how much in demand you are.

Demand? You’ve won a grand total of two primaries in states with glorious traditions, Georgia and South Carolina. And now, after Rick Santorum’s withdrawal, you insist you’re the man to put Mitt Romney on a path that’s conservative enough to meet your failed expectations. “I am committed to staying in this race all the way to Tampa so that the conservative movement has a real choice,” you said after Santorum quit.

In truth, the conservative movement has had a choice for months, but the choice wasn’t you. Everybody except you understands this. Your inability to see this following defeat after defeat is astonishing. In the 15 primaries in which you and Ron Paul both appeared on the ballot, he beat you 15 times.

Newt, you’re 68 years old, a time to face facts. Nobody likes you.

What is it about you that makes people cringe? Could it be your insufferable hypocrisy? Or maybe it’s your insulting quote on same-sex marriage. You said, “The effort to create alternatives to marriage between a man and a woman are perfectly natural pagan behaviors, but they are a fundamental violation of our civilization.”

“Pagan behaviors?” Really, Newt, you ought not pass judgment on other people’s wishes to marry when you have defined marriage in your own life as courtship, marriage, affair, divorce, courtship, marriage, affair, divorce, courtship, marriage and counting.

Is it that self-delusion that turns people off? Recently you said you were the only candidate who could prevent Romney from getting the nomination. Newt, you couldn’t stop Minnie Mouse.

And now, your sugar daddy, Sheldon Adelson, says it seems like enough is enough. After pouring $15 million into your campaign, Adelson said it’s about the end of the line for you.

With a little luck, America is through with you, too.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

To listen to some presidential candidates and their radio lapdogs tell it, the country is going straight to hell because taxes are too high, services are too available, morals are too loose, gasoline is too expensive and, oh yeah, the teachers have teamed up with Barack Obama to bring America down.

Teachers have it easy, the absurdist right says. Their pensions are killing us (suggesting they got those pensions not through collective bargaining but by out-and-out theft). And the ultimate slander: Teachers are lazy. I can tell you this is false based on my one-hour as head of a class of young primary grade kids.

A friend who is a veteran teacher had asked a scientist she knows to talk with her early-grade students about asteroids, comets, planets and the solar system. She told the kids to write essays about their meeting with him.

Now she wondered if I would spend an hour with a small group of children, look at their writing and make some suggestions. I had done this for her once before when I covered transportation for The Record in Hackensack, but that time she was in the room and in charge.

This time, she’d be outside at the school garden with some of her other pupils. I would be in charge in her classroom.

What could be less complicated than tending to six kids? So, on to asteroids. I asked them to write about the most important thing they’d learned from their scientist.

I wasn’t prepared for a bunch of young people all speaking at once. But as soon as one said something it was as though someone threw a switch and they all chimed in – on various topics of interest. They weren’t listening to one another. The noise grew.

“One at a time,” I said, but they never heard me. They just kept going. Don’t get me wrong. They were sweet kids, with a lot on their minds. Except for the one kid over on my left who just stared out the window. He put his hand to his face. I wondered if he was all right.

“Problem?” I asked.

“Just thinking,” he said casually and I noticed that he wrote little but seemed to have the correct answers most of the time when I asked a question. Now my question was, “What is an asteroid?” I wasn’t testing them. I just hadn’t considered the universe lately.

One of the girls wrote about their guest from science and I suggested she include his name. “Good idea,” she said and was about to say something else when one of her friends informed me, “She’ll write his name now.”

A boy said he wanted to write about an asteroid belt. “An asteroid belt?” I asked. He assured me I would understand just as soon as he wrote his paper. He spoke loudly and dominated our study area. I found myself paying more attention to him than to the others. He found his own banter most amusing. No doubt, a bright kid.

Just as I was wondering how a professional teacher would restore some order and calm, one of the girls leapt out of her seat, ran across the room and returned with a bell. “Ring this,” she said. “It will be quiet.”

I rang it. It had a nice shrilly sound. Instantly the room was quiet. The calm lasted for a minute or two, and then the kid interested in asteroid belts said something that cracked everyone up. And again the question rose in my consciousness: What do I do now?

I didn’t have to think for long. The hour had flown by even if each minute seemed to drag along at tortoise speed due to my ignorance about what to do next.

They flew outside to join their teacher at the garden. I wish I knew where she gets her energy — I was exhausted. Before they yammer about the easy life of teachers, I think critics of teachers ought to spend a day maintaining order while teaching kids how to read.

They were a great bunch of uninhibited kids even if I never got that promised explanation of an asteroid belt. I was tempted to ask my friend how she does it hour after hour, day after day, but remembered the response from a professional magician when I asked “How’d you do that?” after one of his tricks.

“Very well,” he said, and my friend would be justified in saying the same thing.

Any teachers – or their informed critics – reading this? How easy is teaching?

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Meet the imperious Mr. Henry Gatewood, manager of the Cattlemen’s and Miners’ Bank branch in Tonto, a dusty outpost in southeastern Arizona. Listen to the words of Gatewood and those of some 21st century politicians and bankers and you see they are his direct descendants.

It is several years after the Civil War, and the better ladies of Tonto are running a hooker and a drunken doctor out on the next stagecoach east. The other passengers include an outlaw, the sheriff, a gambler, a whiskey salesman, the wife of a wounded cavalry officer, and Gatewood, played Berton Churchill.

This is the set-up for “Stagecoach,” the 1939 movie by John Ford, a terrific show all around, but with one scene that deserves a special look.

Gatewood sits between the two women on the stagecoach and speak s a deliciously ironic – not to mention prescient – soliloquy. At this point, we know Gatewood’s felonious secret; the passengers do not.

“I don’t know what the government is coming to,” he blusters. “Instead of protecting businessmen, it pokes its nose into business. Why, they’re even talking now about having bank examiners. As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks. Why, at home I actually had a letter from a popinjay official saying they were going to inspect my books.

“I have a slogan that should be emblazoned on every newspaper in this country: ‘America for the Americans.’ The government must not interfere with business. Reduce taxes. Our national debt is something shocking, over $1 billion a year. What this country needs is a businessman for president,” he says. In another 100 years or so, it would be the regulation-hating Ronald Reagan declaring in his first inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Reagan’s groupies still quote that ignorant line. They forget, like Henry Gatewood forgot, that while an unregulated business class may rail against government oversight, working people and the middle class need such protection to survive.

Gatewood would have the passengers believe he’s a great American. Except that inside the little valise Gatewood holds close to his chest is the $50,000 he has just stolen from his bank.

Gatewood was a man before his time, and parsing his words is instructive.

–Like today’s bankers, Gatewood wants protection from the government, not regulation. But it’s the rabble of Tonto who stand to lose that uninsured $50,000.

–“As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks,” he harrumphs. The last few years have shown that, indeed, lots of bankers don’t know the first thing about running a bank.

–Gatewood complains about popinjay officials demanding to inspect his books. In fact, a lot of misery could have been avoided in America over the last few years if scores more regulators had been on the job.

–Then, Gatewood’s final words. First his nativist call for “America for the Americans.” Then his demand that government get the hell out of the way of business. And then the inevitable “Reduce taxes.”

And at last, he says the country needs a businessman for president – someone to protect all the Henry Gatewoods who take the money and run.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Allow me to speak on behalf of Mr. Abraham Shubinsky, a man who traveled to the United States in 1909, not to escape his Judaism but to make distance between himself and groups of dangerous home-grown anti-Semites.

In a small town about 100 miles southwest of Kiev, he managed a mill and was subjected to verbal violence as a result of the combination of his faith and position.

He traveled alone to New York, got a job and saved money. In 1911 he had enough to send to his wife back in Ukraine so she and their two young daughters could join him in New York.

He was an orthodox Jew. He kept the Sabbath. He went to the synagogue. He kept the commandments. He and his wife kept a kosher kitchen. He presided over a crowded Seder every year at Passover. In America he would be safe.

So on behalf of Abraham Shubinsky – he died in 1961 – I, his grandson, do hereby renounce and reject any move by any member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to baptize him.

I don’t know if the Mormons – they have been reported several times to baptize dead Jews with whom they had no connection – ever got to my grandfather. The story doesn’t change; whenever it has been told, the baptizers feel saintly and Jews feel rage.

And now, Anne Frank and Daniel Pearl have been baptized by some individual Mormons with overheated senses of duty at churches in the Dominican Republic and in Idaho.

How dare they? Anne Frank spent two years hiding from the Nazis, then six months in Auschwitz where she died. Daniel Pearl was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal murdered by al-Qaeda in 2002.

The Mormons have no problem with posthumous baptism, though a letter from the leadership to Mormon churches throughout the world reiterates the official position that Mormons seek out members of their own families for posthumous baptism and refrain baptizing celebrities and victims of the Holocaust. So the people who baptized Anne Frank and Daniel Pearl ran counter to church doctrine.

Because baptism of dead Jews has occurred before, the letter is hardly reassuring to the relatives of Jews who died under gentler circumstances and who now could be selected for baptism after death.

Such baptism is a velvety form of anti-Semitism. The message to a dead Jew is: Your god failed you; ours would not. The message to living Jews is: See how much we love you? Enough that we would rescue you from the unhelpful clutches of Judaism.

Abraham Shubinsky, who died at 84, wouldn’t have bought it for a moment, and wouldn’t have chosen to spend eternity hanging out with Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. Nor would Anne Frank. Nor, I suspect, would the overwhelming majority of the 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust.

They suffered for their faith. We, their survivors, and other people of good will, suffer for their pain, for their lives cut short, for the lunatic ignorance that sent them to the camps, and for their terrible inability to rescue their children and parents, sisters and uncles, friends from the fires.

The Mormons should walk away and allow Jews to rest in peace.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

He looks to be about 10 years old and already he has bags under his eyes, a condition usually reserved for people who have seen a lot or who are old. He sits on the ground, holding a red and white keffiyeh. Surrounding him are an adult in what appears to be an Adidas jacket, a kid about his own age, and two more adults, one with his arm on the boy’s shoulder and one stroking his hair.

Nothing helps. The boy, whose name is Ahmed, is bereft, crying, his mouth agape, a look on his face that says, “What happens to me now?” The event is the funeral of his father, Abdulaziz Abu Ahmed Khrer, a man you probably never heard of and likely never will hear about again. The boy is the focus of a picture taken by an Associated Press photographer that ran on Page 1 of the Times last Friday.

I looked at this little boy and found I was unable to turn the page. He was the living symbol of this wretched war that’s being waged by Syria against its people. His eyes held my eyes. Now, almost a week later, that copy of the Times is still on my desk, almost challenging me to walk by without spending some time trying to understand this little kid’s pain.

The father was part of an anti-government demonstration in the Syrian city of Idlib when he was shot dead by a sniper in the pay of the Syrian Army which, in turn, is in the pay and under the ultimate command of an ophthalmologist who happens to own the country, Bashar al-Assad, a man with his own children.

When the history of this war is finally written, Ahmed will be one of its great symbols. For this is a war that pits Assad, the Syrian president and son of the former president, against Abdulaziz Abu Ahmed Khrer and much the rest of the Syrian people.

In his mad bid to retain power, Assad has been the supreme commander of Syrian armed forces that that have killed an estimated 7,500 Syrian people in the last 11 months, a rate of about 25 a day. Additionally, as noted by The Times, the UN reports that 30,000 Syrians have run across whatever national borders were close at hand to escape the killing, and 200,000 others have been ordered to relocate within the boundaries of Syria.

And it gets worse. In order to put a stop to the escapes, the Syrian government has ordered the placement of antipersonnel mines near the borders with Turkey and Lebanon. Stay in Syria and risk death. Try to escape Syria and risk death. What must a man think when he looks at his family and tries to decide what to do next? What must a president think when he orders the use of such barbaric weapons not against an invader but against his own people who do not like him?

The world looks at pictures like the one of Ahmed and the world grieves, wrings its hands, makes threatening noise and ultimately does nothing. And so, the signal Assad receives is that he can get away with it.

But on the day when the snipers are gone and the summary executions are over, the people of Syria will demand justice. If the decent people of the world were smart they’d help make that day come a little sooner.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
I think Rush Limbaugh’s apology was no apology at all, and that decent people everywhere ought to make a list of the sponsors who have dropped from his program, and direct their business to them.

As you doubtless know by this time, Limbaugh used his nationwide radio show to slander Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University as a slut, a prostitute, and as a roundheel – a woman, my dictionary says, who yields readily to sexual intercourse. His tirade was the result of Fluke’s testifying before a congressional committee about the high cost of contraceptives to people with limited means.

Limbaugh was having none of it. “Your daughter… testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she wants President Obama to provide them, or the Pope,” Limbaugh blathered. President Obama? The Pope? What is this man talking about?

Limbaugh, revealing a magnificent ignorance, likened Fluke’s request for affordable birth control to her asking taxpayers to pay her to have sex. Therefore, in Limbaugh’s twisted view of the world, Fluke is a prostitute. Sheer lunacy.

“What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke,” Limbaugh asked his audience. And he couldn’t even get her name right. She’s not Susan.

Some sponsors quit, and a chastened Limbaugh decided he would apologize. Let’s parse his regrets.

“For over 20 years,” Limbaugh said, “I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity [Meaning that Fluke’s congressional testimony was “absurd,” a request for an inexpensive product to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease? How could such a request be called absurd?] three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words [Which words would have been the right words? He doesn’t say.] in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke. [He describes a woman he has never met, never heard of, as a slut and a prostitute and then declares he meant no personal attack? If not a personal attack, what would he call it? He doesn’t say.]

Limbaugh then forgets about his insult to Fluke. He forgets about the disgrace he brought on himself, and speaks 118 words decrying the fact that here we are in a presidential election year and we’re talking about sex.

“My choice of words,” Limbaugh says, “was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.” His words were not the best but he slithers out of saying which words would have been more appropriate. He smeared a young woman’s reputation and standing in an attempt to be – humorous? Humorous, as in a joke? That’s about as funny as making jokes about Limbaugh and Oxycontin.

An apology? It wasn’t even a good imitation of one.

Did you believe him?

* * * * *
My friend Farber sent me a collection of witty bumper stickers, and I got the biggest kick out of this one: Annoyed by Immigrants? Tell it to the Indians.

By Jeffrey Page

I was taken aback when I realized that not once in this election cycle has anyone seen Rick Santorum’s and Newt Gingrich’s birth certificates, or other proof they were born in the United States and not on, say, the planet Neptune.

Was Santorum born in Winchester, Va. and Gingrich in Harrisburg, Pa. as they claim? To determine if they’re constitutionally eligible to be president – only native born citizens can hold the office – I’m founding Birthers II, the Campaign for Natal Truth. We want to see those birth certificates right now.

I bring this up in defense of Article II of the Constitution but also, I must confess, because some of Santorum’s and Gingrich’s views are like their possible birthplace on Neptune – cold, distant, and lacking in humanity. Examples of their thinking follow.

Recently, Santorum accused President Obama of being a snob – his word – for saying he wants everybody to go to college. (The Washington Post did some checking and found that Obama never said this. What he did say was that everyone should get a year’s worth of education after high school at community colleges, four-year colleges, vocational training or apprenticeship.)

“A lot of people in this country have no desire or no aspiration to go to college,” said Santorum (Penn State ’80, University of Pittsburgh ’81, Dickinson School of Law ’86), apparently holding the idiotic belief that Obama would force you to go to college.

Santorum also said he almost threw up – his words – when he read the speech John Kennedy delivered in 1960 to a gathering of Protestant ministers about his running for president as a Catholic. It was a time when some non-Catholics believed a Catholic president would be governed by the Vatican.

“I believe in an America,” Kennedy said, “where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

You find that sickening? The ministers gave Kennedy a round of applause.

Speaking of Kennedy, Newt Gingrich – remember him? – says he would spend what seems to be at very minimum $5 billion to start work on a moon base. Kennedy issued the original moon challenge in 1961.

Only a presidential candidate from outer space would call for a moon mission at a time like this when money is tight, jobs are hard to find, and some people are hungry.

In 1960, when Gingrich was 17, we could afford to go to the moon and to feed hungry children. Nowadays, we can’t and that $5 billion should go for the children. But at 69, and with a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s, Gingrich is happily oblivious to what’s needed in America.

How many hungry kids? The private relief agency Feeding America reports there are 3 million children in the United States at risk of malnutrition. And those are just the ones under age 5. Feeding America also reports that 16.4 million children lived in poverty in 2010. But Gingrich plays Let’s-Pretend-I’m-Jack.

Newt, we knew Jack Kennedy, and you’re no Jack Kennedy.

Gingrich cares as much about children – especially poor ones – as he does about marital monogamy. He wants an end to child labor laws – saying such protections are “truly stupid” – and wants poor kids to do janitorial chores in their schools.

“The kids would actually do the work,” Gingrich said, “they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

It’s too bad Gingrich never served in the military. In Army basic training he would have quickly understood that mopping latrine floors and washing toilet bowls and urinals do not create pride.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
So, once again two armies, each proclaiming purity and excellence of purpose, have lined up facing each other in firing squad formation. On one side is a student at Cranston (R.I.) High School, an atheist, who has determined that the school’s display of a prayer violates her First Amendment rights. On the other side are what appear to be the other 1,800 students, plus much of the community, who have decided that there’s not much wrong with the prayer and that it must remain as is.

Are we ever going to quit wasting time and get past these annual rituals that amount to tests of whose First Amendment rights supersede all others? Isn’t it possible for two sides that strongly oppose each other’s views to come together and acknowledge the humanity of the other side, and not bring in the lawyers? In this case, the attorneys have emerged, some poison pen emails have been posted, and the Board of Education seems to believe it has just two possible responses following the atheist’s victory in court.

Those are to spend a fortune on legal fees to appeal its loss, or take down the banner.

But there’s a third possibility, one that would require people of good will to sit down in a quiet room and actually communicate with one another.

Start this process with a close reading of the banner’s message:

School Prayer
Our Heavenly Father:
Grant us each day the desire to do our best,
To grow mentally and morally as well as physically,
To be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers,
To be honest with ourselves as well as with others.
Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win.
Teach us the value of true friendship,
Help us to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School.
Amen.

If you remove “prayer,” “heavenly father,” and “amen” you’re left with a student wish list to do what? To do good work and to treat people with respect. Nothing subversive there.

The third possible solution could be settled in 10 minutes with a brief rewrite of the banner. Can anyone seriously object to this:

School Credo
In the name of friendship:
May we strive each day to do our best,
To grow mentally and morally as well as physically,
To be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers,
To be honest with ourselves as well as with others.
May we be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win.
May we understand the value of true friendship.
May we conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School.

Of course to turn the prayer into a declaration of beliefs would require people on both sides to back off a little and recognize that the other side could also have some valid points.

Therefore – call me a cynic – compromise will never happen; people will be too busy defending their turf. More’s the pity since there are so many more important things facing our high school students than a hallway banner.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Job description for a hypocrite: Tell people how to run their lives, and cover your tracks well so you don’t have to mention the events of your own life that could prove you’re not as sincere as people might believe. In fact, they might see you as a fraud and you don’t want that.

So here’s Rick Santorum this week coming off a surprisingly strong day in the campaign for the Republican nomination. It’s Rick Santorum who has long been a leader in the anti-choice cause. It’s Rick Santorum who would ban abortions in all cases. Your daughter was raped after the prom and got pregnant? Hey, buck up. She was attacked by her slobbering, half-witted uncle and got pregnant? Hey, it wasn’t the baby’s fault, was it?

As for allowing abortions to save the life of the mother, Santorum recently said: “When I was leading the charge on partial birth abortion, several members [of the Senate] came forward and said, ‘Why don’t we just ban all abortions?’ Tom Daschle was one of them, if you remember. And Susan Collins, and others. They wanted a health exception, which of course is a phony exception which would make the ban ineffective.”

But 15 years ago, Santorum was ready to elect this phony exception to save his wife’s life. Remember those words – “a phony exception” – as you read the rest of this article.

Note 1: This is not based on new reporting. This is a story that’s been around since 1997 but bears repeating when a presidential candidate dismisses a woman’s health and life as phony exceptions.

Note 2: Ordinarily, a candidate’s private life ought to be respected, assuming it contains no felonies. But when hypocrisy rises to such epic levels as Santorum’s, it demands public discussion.

It is 1997, and Senator Rick Santorum is being interviewed by Steve Goldstein of the Philadelphia Inquirer. They’re talking about the pregnancy of Santorum’s wife Karen in 1996, a time when Santorum’s position was to abort no pregnancies except those that resulted from rape, incest or to save the woman’s life. Nowadays, there are no exceptions as far as Santorum is concerned.

Goldstein reported that in her 19th week of pregnancy, Mrs. Santorum was informed that her fetus was fatally defective and would die. The Santorums elected to try long-shot corrective uterine surgery, during which she came down with severe infection that would kill her unless she aborted the pregnancy because the fetus was the source of the infection. At times, Goldstein reported, Mrs. Santorum’s temperature reached 105.

How to remove the fetus? By inducing labor, essentially aborting it. “Ultimately they did not have to make a decision; nature made it for them. Karen went into premature labor from an infection, delivering a boy who had a fatal abnormality. The child died two hours later,” Goldstein reported.

But what would have happened had the fetus not died?

“If that had to be the call, we would have induced labor if we had to,” Santorum said. “I consider it a blessing that we didn’t have to make that decision.”

“The doctors said they were talking about a matter of hours or a day or two before [Mrs. Santorum would be] risking sepsis and both of them might die,” Santorum said. “Obviously, if it was a choice of whether both Karen and the child are going to die, or just the child is going to die, I mean it’s a pretty easy call.”

Do you smell a phony exception?

Mrs. Santorum told Goldstein: “If the physician came to me and said if we don’t deliver your baby in one hour you will be dead, yeah, I would have to do it. But for me, it was at the very end. I would never make a decision like that until all other means had been thoroughly exhausted.” But she’d make it if she had to.

That was then. Nowadays Santorum opposes every abortion no matter who the father is, no matter how the pregnancy occurred, no matter what degree of damage that pregnancy would cause the mother.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Loathsome how the Republican right reduces everything to uncomplicated code, such as the one-word putdown “Obamacare.” It’s no longer news that “Obamacare” is based on the health care plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts when he was governor. What matters is that the message is succinct enough to be understood without lengthy explanation. As in Barak is Devil. Barak is Bad Man. It means nothing, but a lot of people buy it.

Isn’t it revealing that the right slanders President Obama as a Marxist or a socialist for his assertiveness for universal health care when even Romney’s harshest critics don’t go near the M-word or the S-word in describing him.

Nor do Romney’s political assailants come even close to describing him as a communist and a fascist, two labels I’ve heard radio geniuses slap on President Obama – in the same breathless sentence.

What brings this to mind, yet again, is the story that circulated over the weekend about Rick Santorum’s 3-year old daughter Bella being hospitalized. She suffers from a serious genetic disorder known as Trisomy 18. Santorum did what any dad would do. He ceased campaigning in Florida and returned north to Bella’s side. Anyone with an ounce of decency, and the wherewithal to exist if the boss says no-you-can’t-take-off, would have done the same thing.

But it got me to thinking how much easier it is to do the right thing when you can afford to do it, when you can tell the boss to get out of your way, when you can get appropriate treatment for your little girl and not worry about the price of care or medication, when you have enough money on hand to pay for the doctor or the mortgage but not both.

Santorum, among the sharp critics of “Obamacare,” made $1.3 million for the 15-month period ending last August. A lawyer in Monticello I wrote about years ago once told me about the danger and the folly of counting other people’s money. And I subscribed to that until now. It is a fact: Rick Santorum can afford health care.

Newt Gingrich, aside from his $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s (sorry, I couldn’t resist), reported a 2010 income of $3.1 million. Right, he didn’t get it for being a lobbyist – oh perish the thought – but as someone offering historical perspective to people who hire lobbyists, some from Newt’s own firm. It is a fact: Newt Gingrich can afford health care.

Mitt Romney reported combined 2010 and 2011 income at $42.6 million. It is a fact: Romney can afford health care.

They all can afford health care but have the nerve to dismiss critics of their opposition to the national plan as soldiers in the armies of class warfare. But it’s the right that has declared the war, suggesting that if your daughter suffered from Trisomy 18, you’d be an unworthy, entitlement-grabbing enemy of the nation in asking that your kid be treated at the same level as Bella Santorum.

Let there be no misunderstanding. Santorum’s daughter deserves the best treatment available. So does every other 3-year old who’s sick. For political candidates with seven- and eight-figure incomes to deny such care is to define wretchedness.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com