It is hard to know where to begin in a critique of Rick Santorum’s latest offense to the written word, his weekly column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Do the logical fallacies he employs trump the overuse of scapegoating and the iresponsibly inflammatory language? Do Santorum’s distortions trump his factual innacuracies? It is hard telling. Perhaps we need a forensic rhetorician here, who can go over the essay with a fine tooth comb and uncover the exact tropes where Mr. Santorum went so tragically wrong. One thing is for certain, more than ever. On Mr. Santorum’s current job as columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, quality does not matter, neither quality of ideas nor quality of writing. But I’ll touch on that last subject at the end of this critque.

Santorum’s column concerns the conflict between the City of Philadelphia and the Cradle of Liberty Council of the Boy Scouts of America. As an Eagle Scout, I’ve been concerned about this issue for a long time, writing about it here, here, here, and here. Of course, for Santorum the Boy Scouts are the saviors of the Inner City against the combined forces of the ACLU, radical feminists, teachers’ unions and pornographers. I’m quite surprised Santorum did not throw in welfare queens, Islamofascists and liberal activist judges legislating from the bench into the mix here — it’s almost like a formula for this guy to just throw blame at these groups without need to put forth one bit of evidence. Oh, Rick Santorum probably thinks he has put forth evidence, but assertions are not evidence, and neither is the referencing of a book title. From Santorum’s Inquirer column, “The Elephant in the Room: Boy Scouts could ease city woes; leave them alone:”

Are public schools “the answer?” Thanks to the ACLU, liberal feminists and teachers unions, our government-run bureaucracy, as Christina Hoff Summers’ book title says, has waged war against boys.

Liberals have largely run our great cities for the last half-century, but not many of them dare cross powerful special interests like the ACLU and the teachers unions, radical feminists or Hollywood and First Amendment absolutists (read pornographers).

Yeah, there it is, Santorum blaming nearly all of the bogeymen that the Republican Party holds profane. Of particular note here is Santorum attempting to prove his argument by calling on a supposed authority, Christina Hoff Sommers, but not referencing her ideas. Santorum is so lame that he references only the title of Sommers’ book! Does he not have the bare intellectual curiosity to dig and note that Sommers does indeed go after an influential feminist and her ideas, Carol Gilligan’s developmental psychology theories. It isn’t enough to note here that Sommers attacks Gilligan on the grounds of reportage and not on the grounds of psychology and careful experimentation, upon which Gilligan’s theories are built. It is enough to note that Santorum shows no sign that he has any apprehension of the issues Sommers addresses. Gilligan is not, as Santorum tries to claim, a radical feminist. He’s factually wrong on that assertion. Indeed, Santorum is wrong about the spelling of Sommers’ name, though I’m sure if confronted, Santorum, like any Republican, would blame the editors for his own incompetence.

Am I on a roll yet? Look, Santorum’s throwing the blame on the public schools is particularly offensive. He does so in favor of all sorts of faith-based organizations that he thinks have helped families more than anything in our country’s history:

Historically, the most potent forces to help families are churches and street-level civic organizations (many of them faith-based). Yet they’re a problem for liberals, since most are not controlled by the government or are morally traditionalist. They often come under assault by a liberal establishment bent on imposing its own politically correct perspective on them.

No, I am not here to praise public schooling, though it seems clear if one looks closely that public schools in the big cities are the ones that have failed, while the schools in the suburbs have thrived over the years. That suggests, does it not, that public schooling isn’t the problem, but likely something else determines the disparity between city schools and suburban ones. Keep in mind Rick Santorum was rather famous in his failed Senate race in 2006 for homeschooling his kids on the public dime, even though he did not qualify for such benefits. His views on schooling are clearly biased, and in this article, simply wrong.

That’s not the only place where Rick Santorum is wrong. He is factually wrong when he describes the City of Philadelphia’s stance on the Boy Scouts, and he distorts Philadelphia’s long relationship with the Boy Scouts as well:

Here in Philadelphia, the lethal threat to liberal orthodoxy and our young men is an organization whose aim is - don’t read this aloud to small children - to teach boys to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent and (shudder) to be morally straight.

This, of course, deeply offends one of the most powerful special-interest groups of the new left, the radical gay activists. To them the Cradle of Liberty Council of the Boy Scouts, which for the record has what amounts to a don’t ask, don’t tell policy toward gays, is the moral equivalent of a malicious street gang that must be banished from the community.

This “gang” of 70,000 young men has been headquartered in the same building on Logan Square for 80 years - a building the scouts themselves erected, invested $1.5 million into in 1994, and spend about $60,000 annually to maintain.

But now the city would like to evict them via the back door. It wants to change their current agreement and force them to pay $200,000 in rent, a sum that city officials know the scouts cannot afford.

The reason: The scouts insist on holding true to their moral and faith-based principles that offend some powerful voices in the gay community.

No, the City of Philadelphia is doing no “back door” manuevers to discriminate against the Cradle of Liberty Council. All of its actions have been out in front of the public for several years now. That’s a false and misleading point on Santorum’s part. Santorum’s sarcasm in describing the Boy Scout mission is weak as well. If he knew anything about the oaths I took as an Eagle Scout, he’d know that honoring all one’s fellow, law-abiding citizens is vital, and the discrimination the Boy Scouts perpetrate against gay citizens is surely legal, but it is discrimination nonetheless. Further, Santorum is wrong to say that the City of Philadelphia has bowed to “radical gay activists.” That is another distortion that offends the duly elected officials of Philadelphia and the citizens who elected them. In our city we will not stand for discrimination, nor will we support such discrimination with public dollars. That’s the crux of the issue here, which Santorum simply ignores as if he thinks his version of faith trumps democracy every time.

Earlier in this essay I implied that Mr. Santorum let the Islamofascists off the hook. Not so fast. Santorum’s most egregious offense in this essay is the use of that Islamofascist word “jihad” to describe the actions of our Mayor Michael Nutter, overwhelmingly elected by the people:

That’s why I just don’t understand Mayor Nutter’s jihad against the Boy Scouts.

There’s no excuse for this kind of offensiveness. It is mean-spirited, especially when one considers Santorum’s famous antipathy towards Muslims. It is also sloppy writing that describes not one little bit the actions of Michael Nutter or the City of Philadelphia. But that’s become the Hallmark of Rick Santorum’s columns in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s simply a bad and irresponsible writer. He’s prone to logical fallacies, gross oversimplifications, mischaracterizations and sloppiness. the one scholar Santorum cites gets her name misspelled. He frames the issue dishonestly. His characterization of the Boy Scouts is incomplete and so imbued with sarcasm as to tar them and their mission. And Rick Santorum is needlessly insulting. Perhaps, though that is highly debatable, the Philadelphia needs another conservative voice beyond Michael Smerconish, but they don’t need the incompetence that is writ large across nearly every Rick Santorum column. Certainly the readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the citizens of this fine city do not deserve the insults Rick Santorum hurls their way.