The Santorum House Scam: Prestidigitation At Its Best

The thing with magic tricks is this; you are desperate to know how they are accomplished and you'd beg a magician to tell you the secret. But, should he or she break his code of honor and reveal the "trick," it is ultimately unfulfilling and somewhat sad. No Santa Claus. No Easter Bunny. If you fear that sort of dissapointment, read no further...



Okay. Here were go. These are things I do not know, but suspect. I repeat, I do not know any of this for a fact. It is merely conjecture. Got that NSA?

The entire "People are invading the privacy of Rick and putting his children in danger" was orchestrated not by a couple of well-meaning, angry taxpayers in Penn Hills, but by the Santorum campaign itself. Crazy? Not at all. Campaigns consultants are called spin doctors for a very good reason; they know how to take a fact or an idea or a thought and then twist it to serve their own purposes. So it is with the miniscule Cape Cod in Penn Hills. The Santorum campaign KNEW this issue wasn't going to go away...so, in meetings and discussions, they tried to figure a way to spin it in their favor. They waited patiently for the Vecchios to speak up again, which they did, right on schedule.

When they did (and I continue to applaud them for their forthright, patriotic moves, particularly under what must be incredible pressure) the Santorum campaign machine kicked into gear. Karen made her famous CALL TO THE CAPITOL POLICE. This was done to make the story as high-profile as possible and to remind us that RICK IS A UNITED STATES SENATOR. I mean, if your house in the Outer Banks was being vandalized wouldn't you call the LAPD? But I digress...

Now Santorum's media hack, John Brabender, who, like a nasty 7-year old insists on called Bob Casey, "Bobby," claims that the Santorum's HAD recently been in the house! Bingo. I bet they have. I bet they have it on tape. I bet they have credit card receipts to prove it! Pictures of Rick holding a copy of that day's P-G showing the date!

Get it folks? It was a parlor trick. The trick accomplished one important thing for Santorum (at least in their minds) It let them pull the first negative commercial out of their hats, while hiding being the unassailable guise that "our children" were endangered.

It also accomplished this; it let this nothing issue predominate the news cycle for a couple of days, at the same time that a new report shows that RICK SANTORUM TOOK MORE CASH FROM LOBBYISTS THAN ANY OTHER SITTING SENATOR.

If I were Rick and Karen, I'd be much more concerned about late night knocks on the door from those lobbyists wanting their quid pro quo!