Idiot of the Week: the Second Santorum Surge continues

Without claiming to be an expert on the pros and cons of hydrofracking, I feel entitled to denounce Rick Santorum's Oklahoma City rant in defense of the controversial natural-gas extraction procedure because of the prizeworthy idiotic attitude he expresses toward any questioning of it. For the returning conservative-alternative-to-Romney of the week, any doubts about hydrofracking are not merely uninformed hysteria but a conscious strategy of guilt-tripping waged by control-freak liberals. 

“[T]he left is always looking for a way to control you," Santorum said, "They’re always trying to make you feel guilty so you’ll give them power so they can lord it over you. They do it on the environment all the time.” Warnings against pollution and risks to public health are nothing less than a "reign of environmental terror," apparently motivated by nothing more than a lust to dominate. Contesting the common characterization of the GOP as the "anti-science party," the former Senator from Pennsylvania dubbed his "the truth party," contrasting it favorably to those environmental terrorists on the other side who "distort the truth in order to get you to give them authority."

Here is a Republican truth claim:

And they’re preying on the Northeast, saying, ‘Look what’s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff’s going to happen, we don’t know all these chemicals and all this stuff.’ Let me tell you what’s going to happen: Nothing’s going to happen, except they will use this to raise money for the radical environmental groups so they can go out and continue to try to purvey their reign of environmental terror on the United States of America.

Never mind the assertions that something has already happened where hydrofracking was done. Rick Santorum says nothing will happen. I'm willing to entertain the argument that some environmentalists are excessive in their risk-aversion, but the argument that they have no cause for apprehension apart from a craving for power over other people is nothing but an insult. But having said that, Santorum may not have said anything wrong. He may simply have expressed himself incompletely. He may be perfectly convinced that "nothing's going to happen," as long as we understand that to mean nothing's going to happen that matters to him. If this year's elections are a choice between people who want to "control" us and people who don't give a damn about us, then at least we'll have a clearer choice than we usually have.