That title sounds like a Hardy Boys title, eh? Ricky is that juvenile and simplistic. No offense to the Hardy Boys.

The worst columnist in America returned to his obsession today. Rick Santorum returned to his obsession with Islamofascists, and he also wagged his finger at the Bush Administration for not using the term. Little Ricky, who has been on this Islamofascist kick for a few years now, so much that we may as well call him a “one trick pony,” is the Philadelphia Inquirer’s shame writ large whenever he produces his “Elephant in the Room” column. (With Ricky’s extreme current obsessiveness about Islamofascism and his previous obsession with gay sex, I’m tempted to suggest they rename the column “Pink Elephant in the Room.) Anyway, here’s the column, and a couple excerpts which I will try to discuss without retching at Santorum’s lapses of logic, history and sanity.

First, here’s Ricky’s criticism that President Bush didn’t listen to him close enough about using the right words when discussing the War on Terror:

At a White House meeting after my press club remarks, I handed the president my speech and told him I thought that we were more apt to lose this war in the streets of America than on the streets of Baghdad. We had to start winning the communications battle at home, and part of that involved coming clean with Americans about whom precisely we are fighting. I suggested, for example, that he abandon the word terror and replace it with Islamic fascism.

A few weeks later, Bush was responding to an impromptu question about a thwarted terror plot in England. For the first time, he described the enemy as Islamic fascists. Then came the backlash - in the media, the Muslim world, and, most important, the State Department. Sources told me that the bureaucracies rose up as one and persuaded the president to never use that term again. He never has.

The assumption here is that Bush’s language, his reticence at using the words “Islamofascists,” or “Islamic Fascism,” has both inhibited the President’s prosecution of the War on Terror and inhibited the public support of that war. Santorum is wrong on both points. Bush and his Keystone Kops prosecution of the war, along with his violation, time and time again, of civil liberties and tenets of international law are truly what have limited his prosectuion of the War on Terror. The Bush Administration ADHD approach of going after Osama, then shifting focus to bogus reasons for invading Iraq and leading our troops into a quagmire, are not timid moves on Bush’s part. His lack of use of Santorum’s pet terminology haven’t hindered Mr. Bush at all. Would that it had been the case. And the lack of use of those words have not chased the public away from supporting the President — the President’s FAILURES have moved the public towards record disapproval ratings for Bush. Santorum thinks some kind of insistence on “political correctness” is why the public no longer supports Bush. Nope, you’ve got it wrong, Ricky. You’re following the right-wing radical playbook well, but you’ve let the facts of disastrous policy escape your obsession with “Islamofascist and the radical right-wing playbook. Look to the facts, Ricky, instead of your obsessions.

This is to say little about Rick Santorum’s casting himself in the role of ignored hero. Man, someone surely can psychoanalyze that, huh? But how about this other tidbit from Ricky’s column today:

In speeches I give across the country, I ask basic questions about the ideology and motivation of the enemy. The response? Blank stares. Seven years into this war, that’s an indictment of our government rather than the intelligence of the public. Why should we learn about radical Muslims if they are not the problem?

This little paragraph is the funniest in the whole “Elephant in the Room” column. The reason Rick Santorum is met with blank stares is not because people aren’t aware of the reasons for terrorism. It’s because people like Rick Santorum have been wrong so often and so long that people are tuning him out. So many promises by the Bush Administration and those that back them, people like Rick Santorum, have failed, that these folks are skeptical of the words of Rick Santorum. Heck, people should be skeptical of Rick Santorum for one other reason — he suffered the biggest loss by an incumbent Senator in dozens of years. Why? Rick Santorum no longer has answers Americans want to hear. Indeed, Rick Santorum is just plain, flat out wrong.

Rick Santorum, the Pink Elephant in the Room, stands as the symbol of Republican incompetence in the early part of this century. The Philadelphia Inquirer should be shamed to carry his column.