We would be remiss if we didn’t cover the breath-taking news out of Pennsylvania last month: values-champion Rick Santorum began a weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. You might expect that Santorum’s maiden effort wouldn’t be worth your time. And you’d be right, in almost every way but one: the first several grafs could easily have been written by VDB. A delicious excerpt:

‘Odd.” It is, indeed, odd to write a column every other Thursday for a paper that used that very word to describe me. Actually, odd was one of the nicer terms used in The Inquirer to describe me. Imagine these words next to your name in your high school yearbook — disingenuous, snake oil peddler, smug, arrogant, chicken-livered, intolerant and fatalistic.

And most of those labels were in news stories.

My new employer also claimed not so long ago that I “inspire contempt” and “have lost my mind” and that my actions bore a remarkable resemblance to Joe McCarthy’s. You know? The namesake of McCarthyism.

At the time, I took solace from the implied compliment. At least The Inquirer thought I was making a substantial mark on my generation. Not bad for someone they also called a “doofus.”

— Rick Santorum, 11/8/07