How stupid? Stupid enough to get his name trending on Twitter Sunday afternoon. Which means...



I don't know how many people Googled Rick Santorum yesterday but I can tell you that whenever Santorum says something stupid on television—which happens just every time he goes on television—my mentions explode. I'm proud to be the, um, the second thing that comes to mind when people hear Santorum's name. Even God felt compelled to weigh in yesterday...


Rick Santorum, of course, is a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, a two-time failed presidential candidate, a bigot, a sexist, an asshole who wants to slap the pill right out of your slut mouth, and my old college roommate. After washing out in the 2016 Republican primary, CNN brought Santorum on board as a paid contributor and he's been making an indecent living coughing up rightwing hairballs talking points ever since.

So what fool thing did Santorum say this time? Over to you, Daily Beast:

The day after hundreds of thousands of students and their supporters marched across the country and the world to advocate action on gun violence, Rick Santorum told CNN that they might as well give up now. “How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that?” the former Republican senator suggested on State of the Union. He went on to dismiss the “action” taken by the student activists who survived a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, last month as little more than asking someone else to pass a law. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem? How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my own community? What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?’” Santorum said. “Those are the kind of things where you can take it internally, and say, ‘Here’s how I’m going to deal with this. Here’s how I’m going to help the situation,’ instead of going and protesting and saying, ‘Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.’”

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Santorum added that some "phony gun law" isn't going to solve the problem of mass shootings. But the gun laws Santorum dismisses—background checks, assault weapon bans, mental health screenings, safe storage laws, age restrictions—do a damn fine job of "solving the problem" of gun violence in countries that aren't burdened by an ambiguous and open to interpretation and/or distortion amendment written more than two hundred years ago—to say nothing of a well-funded, caucasian-fronted terrorist organization. Those "phony" gun laws? They're supported by supermajorities of the American people and the failure of our elected representatives to pass them is reason why The Onion can run this story over and over and over again.

America's ER doctors—the people who witness the carnage firsthand—took to Twitter to call bullshit:

Stunned physicians were quick to counter Santorum's assertion. "As a surgeon, I’ve operated on gunshot victims who’ve had bullets tear through their intestines, cut through their spinal cord, and pulverize their kidneys and liver," tweeted surgeon and health care columnist Eugene Gu. "Rick Santorum telling kids to shut up and take CPR classes is simply unconscionable." Rebecca Bell, a pediatric critical care physician in Vermont, tweeted that survival rates of trauma victims who require CPR at the scene of a shooting are "very, very low." "Survival rate of people who don't get shot in the first place: much, much better, " Bell tweeted. Trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran tweeted that he felt compelled to correct a "false perception" Santorum may have conveyed. "Victims that go into cardiac arrest after #GunViolence are Bleeding to Death. CPR is NOT effective in this situation," Sakran tweeted.

The wounds inflicted by AR15's are particularly damaging—performing CPR on someone whose internal organs were pulverized isn't going to help and is likely to make matters worse. And it's difficult to perform CPR on someone while an active shooter is still, you know, actively shooting at you, your teachers, and your classmates. But Santorum's right about one thing: students shouldn't expect their elected representatives to solve "their problems"—their problem being active shooters armed with weapons of war—so long as the GOP controls both houses of Congress and the White House. We're going to have to vote the bastards out before we can work on solving the problem of gun violence in this country.

But, hey, it could've been worse. Santorum could've urged those Parkland students to go collect rocks.

It's obvious why a former politician feels compelled to continue regurgitating NRA dissembling points. No longer seeking office, no longer reliant on NRA for money or that A+ rating, no longer living in fear of being primaried from the right, dirtbag politicians like Santorum have no choice but to keep eating Wayne LaPierre's ass in public. Because they can never admit they were only pretending to believe the demonstrable falsehoods pushed by the gun lobby. They can never come clean. Once bought, they stay bought.