Ready for President Butt Sechs?
Rick Santorum’s Anal Sex Problem
Rick Santorum would very much like to be president. For the past few years, he has been diligently appearing at the sorts of conservative events–the Values Voters Summit, the Conservative Political Action Conference–where aspiring Republican candidates are expected to show up. But before he starts printing “Santorum 2012” bumper stickers, there’s one issue the former GOP senator and his strategists need to address. You see, Santorum has what you might call a Google problem. For voters who decide to look him up online, one of the top three search results is usually the site SpreadingSantorum.com, which explains that Santorum’s last name is a sexual neologism for “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”
Santorum’s problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the “definition of marriage” has never included “man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.” The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who’s gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to “memorialize the scandal.” The winner came up with the “frothy mixture” idea, Savage launched a website, and a meme was born. Even though mainstream news outlets would never link to it, Savage’s site rose in the Google rankings, thanks in part to bloggers who posted Santorum-related news on the site or linked to it from their blogs. Eventually it eclipsed Santorum’s own campaign site in search results; some observers even suggested it may have contributed to Santorum’s crushing 18-point defeat in his 2006 campaign against Bob Casey.
To at least make a dent, Santorum could try a concerted push to generate links to his domain on prominent sites and blogs, ginning its Google ranking; Mark Skidmore, an expert in search-engine marketing at the online strategy firm Blue State Digital, says Santorum should also consider buying paid search results for his name. He says the Obama campaign successfully used this strategy to help bury sites that claimed Obama was a Muslim or not an American citizen. But like Fertik, Skidmore thinks Santorum faces an uphill battle, in part because Savage’s site has been up for so long–with more than 13,000 inbound links, compared with only 5,000 for Santorum’s own site, America’s Foundation. “He’s staring at a very big deficit,” Skidmore observes.</em>
I find this so incredibly joyous. Not only because a theocratic busybody has been made into a punchline, and thus no longer a threat to our personal liberties in any meaningful way, but more so because of how it happened.
Rick Santorum met the future. And not surprisingly, the future has no use for him, so those who are already living in that world (ie, online) have exercised their freedom of speech to respond to this liberty loathing, homophobic twit by showing the world just how insipid he is. He has no hope at all of turning this around, since I doubt he or his people are remotely internet-focused, so whatever he planned on accomplishing in life has been eclipsed by a dirty joke.
Which is fitting, since that’s all he’s ever been. Good riddance to stupid, hateful rubbish.