Sunday, May 22, 2005
The Mother of All Puff Pieces.
Attytood has a nice dissection of the NYT magazine cover story (with a most pious picture) on Sen Ricky Sanctimonious.
Indeed, the article goes to great lengths to portray Santorum as a friend to blacks and Latinos. There's a long passage with Philadelphia minister Herb Lusk, who says wonderful things about the senator -- a senator who's helped Lusk and his non-profit gain millions in government aid. Ditto the Black Clergy of Greater Philadelphia and Vicinity, which lined up $4 million in government aid by way of Santorum and Specter.I do hope that whatever the NYT got paid for this piece covers the shortfall in their ad revenue. There is no other reason for something this bad.
The missed opportunities are many:
In 2002, in a little-noticed interview that took place in Rome, Santorum told National Catholic Reporter, a U.S.-based weekly, that he considered George W. Bush, a Methodist, to be ''the first Catholic president of the United States.''
But Sokolove passed here on a chance to mention why Santorum happened to be in Rome: He was flown there by the academic arm of the ultra-conservative Catholic group Opus Dei. The event was to honor Saint Josemaria Escriva, the Opus Dei founder whose life and subsequent canonization under Pope John Paul II has been shrouded in controversy.
Santorum told the National Catholic Reporter that he was an admirer of Escriva -- who is recorded as having whipped himself until the walls of a bathroom were splattered with blood and once wrote: "Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain...Glorified be pain!" Santorum may be a man of faith, but his views would be considered extreme by most American Roman Catholics -- something you wouldn't know from this article.
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