At “I Have a Theory About That,” we generally don’t advocate for or against specific political candidates or issues, so much as we work hard to get you to actually think and consider the issues, and understand where the candidates stand on them. In this instance, though, I am going to make an exception, because I really think this person is so vile and contemptible that he deserves as much scorn as we can possibly muster. I generally advocate against bullying, too. I think we need to be supportive of all sorts of diversity of demographics, opinions, and viewpoints. However, Rick Santorum is just vile and contemptible, and I’m committed to doing everything possible to cleanse our society of such filth.
So, as a bit of a PSA of a sort, I’m offering you the opportunity to explore this definition so you can understand exactly, specifically, the kind of vile filth we’re talking about here.
Back in 2003, as you might already know, the senator from Pennsylvania drew the ire of a great part of the sensible, articulate rhetorical community (as well as gay rights activists and a lot of establishment politicians, for spewing vile, frothy filth. So, columnist Dan Savage decided, rather than just whine and complain, to actually do something about it. He mounted a campaign to coin a new word, Rick Santorum’s namesake, and in a way that would likely repulse the senator. In doing so, he enlisted the aid of a lot of bloggers, since search engine rankings are partly dependent on incoming links. (they’re also dependent on volume of searches, clicks, site visits, and the like, so as a reader, your own participation is very helpful)
Not that Mr. Savage wasn’t a good sport about it. In 2010, Mr. Savage offered to take the site down if Mr. Santorum would donate $5 million to Freedom to Marry, a group advocating marriage equality.
The campaign to redefine “santorum” has been tremendously successful. In fact, as recently as September of this year, now GOP-presidential-hopeful Rick Santorum asked Google to remove it. The Google folks responded that far from being a “prank” or a “Google Bomb,” that indeed the search term yielded a real page about the term “santorum,”, unlike, say, the well-known prank to cause Google’s search algorithm for the keyword “miserable loser” to point to George W Bush’s page, say, or the search for “French military victory” to point to a fake 404-error page that reads “did you mean ‘French military defeat?’, and that removing it would compromise the integrity of their search results. “It would be like you saying,” explained a Google spokesperson, “I don’t like the word “unicorn” and so I think you should remove it from your search results.” Generally speaking, the page “spreadingsantorum.com” has solid footing in Google’s search rankings, with over 13,000 inbound links to the senator’s own 5,000. However, since launching his presidential campaign, the Senator’s page traffic has increased greatly, and in order to keep Savage’s page on top (not that we’re privileging or disparaging particular sexual positions or anything), he’s enlisted the help of his “flying monkeys” (that would be us).
You’ll notice that throughout the next few months, there will be numerous links appearing throughout this site to help solidify the top search-engine ranking for this definition of the term “santorum” rather than the candidate by that name’s page. This is intentional, of course, and it would help matters even more if you clicked those links regularly. It’s important, I think, that organically, the top search engine result reflects this neologism, and not that piece of vile, contemptible filth, not that the Senator has the slightest chance of actually getting the Republican nomination. Of course, neither does Michele Bachmann (speaking of gay marriage– if she hates the idea so much, why is she in one, I wonder?) or Newt Gingrich. Today, of note, my favorite congressman, Bahney Fwank, said on Hardball in response to Gingrich’s allegation that he should be in jail, “When you think you’re the intellectual leader of the free world, and you find yourself struggling to pass Michele Bachmann in a poll in Iowa, it’s unsettling.”
