RICK SANTORUM: DESCENDED FROM SNOBS

From an obituary for Rick Santorum's father, Aldo Santorum, in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, January 20, 2011:

Aldo Santorum called the GI Bill the greatest gift he received. He gave back by building a career and family around veterans hospitals.

"We always lived on the campus of the veterans hospitals. It was called the domiciliary," said his son, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Penn Hills. "I always joked that I spent my childhood living in public housing."

... "My grandfather was working in the auto industry but lost his job during the Depression," Rick Santorum said. "He finally found a job in the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania in 1929 and the family joined him."

The family lived in a company town called Carpenters Park. "After several years in the mines, the family moved upscale to nearby Tyler Hill," Santorum said.

[Also] Santorum joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 after high school, serving most of World War II in the South Pacific where his main job was repairing airplanes.

After returning from the war, he earned a psychology degree from St. Francis College in Loretto, a graduate degree from Catholic University in Washington and a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Ottawa.

"He then went to work for the Veterans Administration and that is where he met my mom," Rick Santorum said....

I assume Santorum will keep talking about the snobbery of President Obama's call to get as many young people as possible into higher education, especially if the Rickster wins Michigan -- and I can imagine even the mainstream media includes one or two journalists who might stumble on the fact that Santorum's own daddy used a gummint program to earn some sheepskins and get himself the hell out of coal country. I'm sure Santorum will have a ready answer: that Aldo Santorum avoided indoctrination by getting two of his degrees at Catholic institutions (though nothing would prevent them from doing exactly the same thing if Obama succeeds in expanding educational access), and that that was an era when radical liberal atheistic indoctrinators hadn't taken over the academy (though the young William F. Buckley would have disagreed).

I hope someone goads Santorum to up the ante -- hey, maybe we should take some pointy-headed intellectuals, break their glasses, and make them do some manual labor! (Y'know -- just like the ChiComs and the Khmer Rouge!)