Rick Santorum Says 'Smart People Will Never Be on Our Side'.

"We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country," Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." …

"When it comes to conservatism libertarian types can say, oh, well you know, we don't want to talk about social issues," Santorum said. "Without the church and the family, there is no conservative movement, there is no basic values of America."

Rick Santorum said that this like it is a good thing.  

Doug Mataconis had a good piece on this over the weekend at the center-right Outside the Beltway blog.

What Santorum said today is emblematic of rhetoric you hear quite frequently from people on the right such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity. Generally, the idea seems to be that there's something about being intelligent, or curious about the world, or interested in something beyond the orthodox interpretations of history and the law that conservatives insist upon. You see it manifest itself in the rejection of even the rather obvious fact that humanity can have an influence on the environment around it and, most irrationally, in the very rejection of everything that biology, anthropology, physics, and cosmology teach us. For many on the right, it's easier to believe in the stories written in a 6,000 year old book than it is in the evidence of just how amazing the universe around them actually is. They can believe whatever they want, of course, but the fact that they constantly try to force these beliefs on others, most especially through the public school system, makes their disdain for knowledge a matter of public concern. […]

It's quite ironic that there's an entire branch of conservatism that has come to this, because things were quite different when the modern conservative movement started.