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As you might recall, we wrote a month or so ago about how Mitt Romney is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Communist China. Today, we write about Rick Santorum's Quisling moment. Like Mitt Romney, Santorum started out his career labeling himself a progressive, distancing himself from Ronald Reagan, working closely with unions and pushing other liberal legislation.

In his later years, Santorum referred to liberal fellow Senator Arlen Specter as his mentor and even endorsed him against a conservative primary rival "because it will further the causes in which I believe and because it's in the best interest of my state." Obviously, those would be liberal interests. Specter led the controversial charge for amnesty in 2006 despite a precedent-setting uproar by Americans who made history with the sheer volume of calls to the capital switchboard made to register their abhorrence of the legislation Specter championed. Instead of acquiescing to the will of the people, however, Specter marched up to his lectern on the Senate floor, pounded it with his fist and declared, "The will of the Senate will prevail!" Specter was soon removed from office, but Santorum continued to have nice things to say about him.

Enter Rick Santorum 2012, candidate for Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces, champion of contraceptive bans and backward Taliban-style rules for women - the obvious over-compensation for his liberal past. All of this would be as comical as a goofy sweater-vest were it not for the real damage his voting record as Senator has done, is doing, and will do to our survival national security interests.

To wit, Santorum voted in 1997 to allow the sale of supercomputers to China, whose military leaders have repeatedly sworn to destroy us, make war on us, and to literally "exterminate" our entire population. Maybe if Santorum had spent less time distancing himself from Reagan and Gingrich in the 1980s, he would have learned something rather important: giving your enemy the technological advantage is suicide. In recent years, China's fastest supercomputers surpassed our own for the first time in history, and by 2010 were an astonishing "47% faster than the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's machine". Make no mistake: this alone disqualifies Santorum to be Commander-in-Chief.

Our strategic advantage has long leaned on technology, given our comparatively small force size vis-à-vis China or the former Soviet Union. China's army alone is roughly the size of our entire population. Imagine that force size equipped with modern weaponry that far exceeds our own. That is defeat and the end of America. Rick Santorum voted for that.

Clearly, Santorum has failed to comprehend the strategic consequences of his actions, as the recent outcry over his outspoken opposition to manned space flight and a return to the moon demonstrates.  Former Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Cheney and current national security advisor to Newt Gingrich Stephen Yates rightly eviscerated Santorum's childish, out of touch, and ultimately suicidal space policy:

I am deeply concerned that Senator Santorum so easily relinquishes space development to the Chinese and Russians.

American success in space is not only about being the first to develop a station on the moon. It is just as much about the explosion of math, science, engineering and national security technology that will launch America into a new age of innovation and prosperity.

We owe it to ourselves to set grandiose goals and then achieve them. It is the American way.

As with Romney and Huawei (and many of his other failures), Americans might be more forgiving if there were some serious evidence of enlightenment; however, in the case of both Romney and Santorum such an opening of the mind has not transpired and both candidates continue to represent an indirect but existential threat to American national security.



H/T to @MissLiberty on Twitter for the heads up on Santorum's pro-China voting record and for the China supercomputer tech links.

Related:

China's Supercomputing Goal: From 'Zero To Hero'

Rick Santorum's Voting Record

Middle East Quarterly: Russian and Chinese Support for Tehran

China Plans Manned Moon Mission

China's Challenge at Sea

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.

You sure as heck can't land there, let alone build a base

You have to love those crazy anti-science troglodyte RINOs and liberal Democrats in Washington. If they had their way, we'd turn back the clock and all live in 14th Century fiefdoms (under their control, of course) in mortal fear of fire and the Plague. US Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich offers the only way forward for the human race; the rest can go read Obama's eighth grade-level SOTU address. Am I suggesting that Mitt Romney and his kind are dullards? Dumb as rocks, yes. Dumb as geese that look up when it rains so they drown, yes!

They also realize that Newt's vision will benefit the American people and perpetuate this greatest country "on God's green earth", as Michael Medved puts it. I was a bit serious when I said they want to turn back the clock, but they want to turn it back to before 1776 when rights were not seen as unalienable and no one anywhere on earth knew they could clamor for them. To the effete, the golden years were the millennia that went before our time - the American era. Put succinctly, we're dealing with a bunch of Dark Age revanchists.

Can you just imagine what the technology gained from such a project as a return to the moon and beyond would mean for the average American and for our country as a whole, particularly as we face down this decade the emerging need to defeat a new evil empire, Communist China?  If it's true that every NASA dollar has a seven-fold ROI on what would then be just a percent or two of the annual budget, what rational person would object? I'll tell you: the same regressives who killed the Apollo Program in 1973, that's who. RINO Richard Nixon - a who literally slept with a Chinese honey trap while on a business trip before his presidency - and the liberal Democrat Congress. They killed the program promising to end poverty once and for all by spending all the NASA money and everything else they could find at it so that today we have more poor and none of the improvements a 40-year continued presence on the moon (to say nothing of Mars by now) would have brought us.

And I imagine that doesn't even factor in the economic benefits of people who become more productive as a result of the augmented quality of life experienced due to the phenomenal new technology in every sector. The return is literally exponential, just like everything else that is quintessentially American - and everything else the RINO-Democrat cabal seeks to regulate to death or outright kill.

There have been few truly visionary presidents or presidential candidates in the past century. John F. Kennedy took us to the moon but never lived to see it. Ronald Reagan fought to revive our space program and oversaw a successful shuttle program that was meant to do so much more - and almost never lived to see it. Newt Gingrich today sees it, gets it, and forges ahead to make it happen, and the establishment is doing everything it can to destroy him politically so that he will never see his vision fulfilled. 

You have to hand it to the real knuckle-draggers like Caveman Mitt, who seem to live in a world devoid all of human history and the nature of progress - and thus an understanding of why we enjoy the benefits. It's as if they believe we were suddenly plopped down here with our cars, our microwave ovens, and lasik by some marvelous act of the cosmos (which we dare not profane by exploring). Anyone who loves science, progress, and wants to see man reach to the stars - and who doesn't want a terrorist regime like China to be our ambassadors to the heavens - I implore you to put aside your politics and obsession with social issues that have hardly budged in 40 years anyway. Let's make this happen.

Who wouldn't volunteer if given the opportunity to go, to explore the moon, Mars, and beyond, even if they could never make it back? Is this not the necessary next step for the human race? Those of us who get the importance of reaching out to the next frontier sense very deeply how much we simply can't not do this. It's the next step and the next "giant leap" - and one whose time has come to take. Let's put one foot in front of the other and see where it takes us; and we can start by electing the only man who can - or will - support that vision: Newt Gingrich.

"So there's the choice in life: one either grows or one decays - grow or die. I think we should grow." -- Robert Zubrin, Aerospace Engineer

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.

Below is a reposting of an article I wrote for the Henry Jackson Society back in 2009 on July 27th. I am reposting it here for two reasons. The first is that the database server at the original website has lost the article; the second reason is why I thought you should read it in the first place, which is that today we are at a crossroads. If we go in one direction we will embrace progress and a future full of wonder with technological advances that will boggle the mind, to say nothing of improving our quality of life in every area, from health care to transportation and communication. History of human progress demonstrates that we must push outward against the boundaries of the unknown or we begin to die. If we take the other road, however, we face being surpassed by enemy regimes like Communist China, the strategic implications of which alone should cause great worry. We as a people will regress through history until we are little more than a byword. Today the visionary is Newt Gingrich. His plan to have a base on the moon by the end of his second term in 2020 is ambitious but well within our reach if we would just decide to do it. Those who oppose him - the same cadre of anti-science, regressive liberal Democrats and establishment Republicans who killed the Apollo Program who today manifest in the likes of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney - mock his vision. But ask any NASA scientist, any serious astronomer and you'll notice they aren't laughing. Newt at times will quote Proverbs 29:18, which wisely advises that, "Where there is no vision the people perish..."

Without further ado:

The Moon and Mars: Vision is as Necessary as Technology 
July 27th, 2009


This week marks the 40th anniversary of mankind's first landing on the moon. It is a journey that began long ago when mankind first set out to explore the nearby hills and trees and then stretched across the millennia. In the course of so many lifetimes, we began our first voyages across the ocean by boat and later by plane, followed by that giant leap on 16 July 1969, though it was also but another small step in many.

Progress has been the primary element to our survival since the beginning; it has been greatly valued by those societies which have managed to thrive even when great sacrifice was involved. Unfortunately, the tale of progress does not have a happy ending as yet. For, in the mid-1970s the U.S. Congress astonishingly voted to cut funding to NASA's lunar program, which by now would likely have spawned a host of great discoveries and possibly even a few manned missions to Mars and perhaps beyond. We will never know what could have come of that lost half century, but it is safe to assume much would have been the reward, because that has been the eternal nature of mankind's pattern of exploration and discovery.

Ironically, members of Congress who voted to kill the Apollo moon program in favor of expanding social welfare programs that many predicted would be a disaster and now we see were complete and total failures like for others to think of them as "progressives". During the same period such self-appointed "progressives" allocated funds like drunken sailors to a plethora of counter-productive social programs, they embarked on starving the two areas most necessary for survival: defense and space; the former allowing Soviet expansion to regress human rights around the world and the latter even endangered what was in the early 1970s a nascent space shuttle program. (1) (2) (3) (4)

There has been nothing progressive about enduring the backward thinking with regard to any of these things. And there is nothing progressive about essentially continuing for another half century in the same direction. Instead of being "progressive", such in Congress instead became "regressive", obsessed only with looking back to outmoded ways of running government, to organizing mankind based on race rather than character, and of course by halting mankind's journey to new frontiers.

While limited-thinkers continue to live in yesteryear and remain determined to keep the rest of us there also, the frontier calls. If the frontier of space is anything like all the other frontiers before it which we have faced, it will ultimately prove invaluable to our survival. Those hopelessly sentimental who do not understand this continue to lie down in the roadway, accusing us of being heartless for having the need to move forward. This farce serves no purpose and is the reason why today we have moved backward in our space program instead of being much farther along than we were half a century ago. Fans of the television series Star Trek might be dismayed to discover there would be no "Enterprise" in the 23rd Century had such regressives run things in the fictional space of that story's narrative. Indeed, the future history of the real world in which we live would be equally as bleak.

Today, astronomers and other scientists, small children, and the entire world wistfully gaze up into the stars and wonder if in our lifetimes a human being will ever set foot on Mars, return to the moon or even if we will be able to put another space station up, so far backward have we moved. Mankind, once the heirs to a bright future measured by great leaps now must sit content to watch re-runs of Star Trek or live in a make-believe galaxy far, far away. Meanwhile our own saga of space flight becomes one of long ago and the tools and resources we will need to thrive in our future as a species remain untapped by a disastrously retrograde mindset.

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.