Twitching the GOP Horses

Rick Santorum, Twitching Demagogue of the Fake Iowa
By Charles P. Pierce


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POLK CITY, Iowa — So Dennis Wendle and Don Boone were hanging out together at home down around Liberty, Missouri (no kidding), and they decided that they were tired of living in a state that counted for so very little in the presidential nominating process, especially when compared to The Crucial Iowa Caucuses. So they packed themselves up for the drive north and, yesterday, they found themselves at a table in the Riesling Sun Cafe in downtown Polk City, which was jumping for nine in the morning, and waiting for the imminent arrival of Rick Santorum, whose campaign was said to be jumping as well, perhaps even as high as second place in TCIC. Dennis and Don were pretty much trapped over their breakfast, what with the fact that patrons of the Riesling Sun were outnumbered about 50-1 by journalists, camerapeople, and TV news haircuts from many lands. (Frank Luntz was haunting the ice-cream counter, possibly attempting to lie pistachio into thinking itself to be chocolate.) Don spoke, in succession, to Canadian TV, Japanese TV, German TV, and a local station from Boston.

“Hey,” Dennis said to me, showing some admirable entrepreneurial drive. “For fifty bucks, you can stand on my chair.”

Dennis is a retired TWA mechanic, and Don worked for Kansas City Power and Light for over 20 years, and also was an official in an IBEW local. They are shopping around for someone to get behind during this election year. They are not optimistic. “It’s big money and it’s big business, and it doesn’t reflect the views of working-class people like us,” Dennis said. “Corporations are not people. See what I mean? The people’s wishes. I don’t even follow Santorum, but I’ll bet, here’s what we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna talk about the moral issues. We’re gonna talk about abortion. We’re gonna talk about all those things that are pretty much settled.

“There’s a trick in the horse industry that we learned before we had sedatives that, if you grab a horse by the lip, and squeeze it, he forgets about anything else. It’s called ‘twitching.’ That’s what they do to us. They twitch us with all that other stuff and pass over the important issues. Not gonna talk about jobs, either, because they’re not here, and they know where they went, but they’re not gonna do anything to bring them back.”..

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