Demagogue

Michelle Malkin not only wrote something that is both fact-based and reasonable but I wholly agree with her!

There are plenty of reasons to bash Boston. But for Sen. Rick Santorum to single the city out as more of a fertile breeding ground for sexual abuse than the rest of the country is just wrong. And dumb. Here's the three-year-old column that Ted Kennedy and friends are up in arms about--and I have to say that they are right, this time, to be incensed.
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What?! I'm all for discussing "No Guardrails" theory and there are thoughtful critiques of liberalism's corrosive impact on the Catholic Church, but Santorum does not bother to explain how sexual promiscuity at Harvard Law is to blame for pedophile-sheltering by Cardinal Law. He ignores the facts, which do not support his theory that abuse was "particularly worse in Boston" because it is liberal.

I've got to hand it to Santorum-- he wrote something so ridiculously stupid that he forced Michelle Malkin to side with Ted Kennedy!

Then again, the geniuses at Powerline "thinks" there is nothing wrong with what Santorum alleges.

The Senator's claim that moral relativism lies at the heart of the sex scandal strikes me as plausible...Exhaustive historical and sociological analysis might demonstrate that Santorum was flat-out wrong. If so, it wouldn't be the first time a Senator erred in alleging a causal relationship between ideology he doesn't like and a phenomenon no one likes. Nothing to condemn here.

Too bad, as Michelle Malkin points out, that the majority of the pedophile cases were in places like Kentucky. From the Washington Post:

Based on statistics publicly reported by many of the country's 195 dioceses, the Boston-based lay activist group BishopAccountability.org has calculated that the highest percentage of abusive priests from 1950 to 2003 was in the diocese of Covington, Ky. Boston was among the 10 worst dioceses, but several other cities commonly regarded as liberal culturally and politically had relatively low rates of abuse. Just 1.6 percent of San Francisco's priests have been accused of abuse, for example, compared to more than 4 percent nationwide.

Think that is compelling enough evidence for Powerline or Santorum to admit that they're wrong? Apparently it's safer for parents to let their children hang out with Catholic priests from San Fransisco than priests from anywhere else. Thanks Michelle!