Alec MacGillis at TNR notes that within minutes of the Santorum campaign voicing a complaint that the mainstream media is pidgeon-holing their candidate as a social issues extremist, the candidate goes on a tear that confirms he is a social issues extremist. MacGillis narrates the most recent examples, in one of which, Santorum compares the situation of the United States today to that of the rise of fascism. The comparison is not only offensive, Santorum needs a history lesson. He said, "But remember, the Greatest Generation, for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness, where our closest ally, Britain, was being bombed and leveled, while Japan was spreading its cancer all throughout Southeast Asia. America sat from 1940, when France fell, to December of ’41, and did almost nothing." Perhaps, Mr. Santorum is unaware of Lend-Lease or the other efforts FDR took to aid the British and the Soviet Union before Pearl Harbor. In hindsight, it is easy to fault FDR for not joining the Allied war effort explicitly, except back then, you still needed an act of Congress to go to war and FDR correctly understood he did not have the votes for such a declaration of war.
