Any decent human being with a modicum of shame would be embarrassed to be seen publicly with Mr. Trump, which is partly why Romney refused to be photographed with the grotesque parody of American wealth-worship when meeting with him late last year, but Romney is in desperation mode as he seeks to win the support of a bunch of people who just don’t like him very much. Now Trump is headlining Romney fundraisers and making radio appearances on behalf of the candidate and making sure that Americans know that they can expect Mr. Romney to be as fine a president as Trump University is a (non-accredited for-profit online) college.

Romney, truly the “Trump Steaks” of Republican presidential candidates, is statistically tied with Rick Santorum in the most recent Michigan poll, and running even with Santorum nationally as well, but this Trump endorsement should be a huge help in his efforts to win over the all-important “credulous racist birther moron” vote.

Trump made sure his big endorsement coincided with the premiere of the new season of “Celebrity Apprentice,” and he is also counting on the fact that everyone basically forgot exactly how toxic his own pretend run for the nomination eventually became last year. And basically only liberal blogs are even bringing up the fact that Trump’s “platform” as a candidate was dark insinuations about the president’s birthplace and personal history, and that it collapsed entirely after the president actually released his “long-form birth certificate,” which showed that his already released regular birth certificate was genuine and accurate. (Though a couple conservatives have criticized Romney’s open embrace of Trump, more because Trump is extremely unpopular than because he’s a racist fraud.)

Romney indulging Trump by accepting his endorsement was gross, and Romney recruiting Trump to actively campaign for him should be universally declared well outside the realm of “acceptable” national campaign behavior, but it’s maybe too obviously sad and desperate for people to get up in arms about. (And the political press is uncomfortable explicitly calling a ridiculous con artist a ridiculous con artist, even when it’s post-birtherism Donald Trump, so the lack of “nationally reviled untrustworthy clown endorses candidate” headlines at the traditional news organizations is not terribly surprising.) But it’s also gross that NBC renewed Trump’s contract and launched a new season of his terrible show, and it did it for similar reasons as Romney: He gets ratings, and headlines.

It just shouldn’t be forgotten or ignored that the only substantial difference between campaigning with Donald Trump and campaigning with Orly Taitz is that Trump is considered kosher because he’s a major-network TV star. (Well, and Orly has much better hair.)

Here is Brooks’ first paragraph:

Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.

Here is the next sentence:

We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.

Haha OK. This is the point where you hit “select all” and then “delete” and start your column again. Brooks must’ve started this thing like 10 minutes before his deadline. (No time to edit it!)

So, yes, a “religious person in professional sports” is like the least anomalous thing in the world, besides maybe “a racist comment under a YouTube video.” Or “an old white guy in political punditry.” (Also, minor note, but: I think there’s actually a decent number — enough to make Lin not particularly “anomalous” — of prominent Asians and Asian-Americans in professional sports, unless you’re only defining “Asian-American” as “of East Asian descent” and you’re only counting the “big four” leagues as “professional sports.” And you’re not really counting baseball.)

While Lin’s Christianity is obviously of great importance to Lin, it honestly has barely anything to do with what made him an instant superstar, except for when hacks want to compare him to Tim Tebow, which is dumb, because Lin is suddenly famous because he’s really good at his sport while Tebow’s whole shtick is succeeding despite being awful at being a quarterback. (If Lin had been a college superstar and high draft pick who was famously inept at the fundamentals of his position, the Tebow thing would be an accurate comparison, but Lin is in fact the opposite of that.)

Having contradicted his own faulty premise five sentences into his column, Brooks rambles on about how he has noticed that being good at sports and being pious is sort of contradictory, because being good at sports doesn’t involve much “humility” or “self-abnegation.” Then we have some boilerplate theological musings, about how sports is like modern society and how Abrahamic religious values contradict modern cultural values, especially regarding individual achievement. (YAWN.)

But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.

For many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue. You achieve loftiness of spirit by performing the most menial services. (That’s why shepherds are perpetually becoming kings in the Bible.) You achieve your identity through self-effacement. You achieve strength by acknowledging your weaknesses. You lead most boldly when you consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause.

I could be wrong, but “consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause” is basically step three of “how to be good at team sports,” after “be gifted physically” and “practice a lot.” (And acknowledging your weaknesses? Like when Magic would spend the off-season practicing “the weakest part of his game” until he improved it?)

The “two moral universes” of religion and societal achievement may be “irreconcilable” — I am not a religious person and hence don’t care — but that has very little to do with Jeremy Lin, or basketball, or politics, which Brooks for some reason brings up in the last paragraph, because he wants to pretend this column has been about something other than extended free-associative riffing on the fact that a famous person is religious.

In conclusion, the New York Times should probably consider having someone take a quick glance at David Brooks’ columns before they publish them.

Mike Huckabee! Glenn Beck! Rush Limbaugh! That time Time magazine called him an “influential evangelical” even though he’s a Catholic and therefore not actually an evangelical Christian! Sarah Palin! The Wall Street Journal!

I have a couple of thoughts on this.

First, those little tildes instead of em dashes for the quote attributions are bugging me. It makes all the quotes look like message board signatures. Second, the Santorum logo is pretty funny. The “O” sun that the eagle is blocking is too small or something, and it looks like this is an ad for Rick Sant Rum.

Also, obviously, if blurbs from Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck make you more inclined to support a candidate, you are basically the sort of person who sums up why America is broken and ungovernable.

Many of these positive quotes came from when Rick Santorum was a fringe candidate polling in the single digits, and they can best be understood as an attempt to be polite to the guy (Palin, a Gingrich enabler, is offering him faint praise here), or, alternately, attempts to damage Romney back when it was still possible for a new acceptable-to-the-elites candidate to enter the race (that was the point of the Journal’s inexplicable attacks on Romney’s perfectly supply-sidey tax plan). But none of that matters now! Rick Santorum will make everyone regret saying nice things about him back when they thought he’d go away after Iowa. (Except Glenn Beck, who probably does think Rick Santorum is likely the next George Washington, even though nothing about that makes any sort of sense, at all.)

Santorum will also maybe make Mitt Romney regret focusing all of his attention (money) on Newt Gingrich. Here’s Santorum’s other, better new ad, in which a creepy Romney lookalike (more a George Romney lookalike, actually?) shoots … “mud” at a Rick Santorum Fathead in that abandoned building from the end of “The Departed.”

George Romney looks so sad when he gets mud on his nice shirt, at the end! (He is also a horrible shot!) Also is Romney just doing target practice with these cutouts or is Santorum tricking him with decoys? It is not entirely clear. (And what does cap-and-trade have to do with anything?) But this ad is much better than the other one, because it is disgusting and odd instead of boring.

It is also, obviously, a negative attack ad attacking another candidate for airing negative attack ads, because an important aspect of the modern political campaign is constantly acting as wounded as possible for any reason at all while calling attention to your opponent’s total lack of basic human decency. Santorum is adept at playing the aggrieved victim (Google and homosexuals are so mean to him!) though he’s practically preempting Romney’s actual attack on Santorum, which didn’t really begin in earnest until, like, yesterday. Still, the important thing is that Santorum has reached the “hiring an impersonator of your opponent” stage, and there is no turning back now. (Next stop: comparing your opponent to a possessed sheep.)

At the National Review’s Katrina Trinko points out, Santorum has bought $41,000 in airtime in Michigan, compared to Romney’s $824,000. So Santorum needs the sillier gimmicky ads, like a Romney doppelganger firing a shit-rifle in a warehouse, to go “viral.” (We’re helping, Rick!) The best way to get free media pickup is to be extremely outrageous and/or shameless, so it’s all downhill from here, in terms of tone. Especially because Santorum’s lead is extremely precarious and based in large part on his not being Gingrich or Romney, both of whom voters now think of as detestable assholes, because of the ads they both ran against each other. (So be careful, Rick!)

Gingrich should not listen to them. At all. (Not that Gingrich listens to anyone, besides perhaps his wife, but still.) This editorial can be safely ignored for the following reasons:

First of all, everyone should always do the opposite of whatever a National Review editorial says to do. The opposite of what “The Editors” want is invariably the correct choice, morally and politically. If politicians always made “doing the opposite of what The Editors of the National Review want” a top priority, there would be universal peace and prosperity and kick-ass super-trains crisscrossing the nation.

Second, The Editors don’t even have the facts of Santorum’s surge correct: As Dave Weigel points out, Gingrich, contrary to The Editors’ claims, has won more delegates than Santorum thus far. Santorum has three delegates. Three. The press likes to cover caucuses and primaries even when they’re meaningless and non-binding and feature negligible turnout because those are the only actual events to cover in a primary race, but the result is that a couple of random wins are massively over-imbued with supposed import, leading even the politically savvy Editors of the National Review to believe that Rick Santorum has actually won a bunch of delegates because he got some old people into some auditoriums in suburban Minnesota.

Third, there is nothing about the Santorum surge that makes it any more sustainable or solid than all the previous candidate surges, except that it’s happening while primary contests are actually happening instead of last September. In other words, a Santorum collapse could be imminent, and it could come whenever Mitt Romney gets around to seriously devoting his attention to destroying him with money. Santorum has a lot of room to be attacked from the right, especially since he’s got the Rust Belt Republican politician habit of occasionally sounding sympathetic to working-class resentment of rich people. And his political history is filled with assorted crimes against current fanatical GOP dogma. Weigel posted a good one earlier: An old campaign ad in which Santorum actually admits to loving newspapers.

Oh also something about supporting Amtrak, despite trains being part of the UN plot to destroy American sovereignty.

Finally, there is the fact that Rick Santorum is an unambiguously awful candidate. He is not just a “social conservative,” he is a paleolithic anachronism of reactionary thought. The American people, despite the fervid wishes of a couple bishops and Kathryn Jean Lopez, are not actually remotely anti-contraception. Most voters — especially since the ratification of the 19th Amendment — think women should be allowed to have jobs outside the home. The last time the Republicans won a presidential election, they had 48% of the female vote, and I imagine they’d like to tie or beat that number this year, maybe? Rick Santorum is decidedly not the man for that job, unless scientists invent some sort of mind control ray that falls into the hands of Phyllis Schlafly.

So, no, Newt Gingrich, don’t quit just yet, and I’m not just saying that because having Gingrich around makes a political writer’s work marginally more colorful. All Gingrich really needs to remain “competitive” in the media race through Super Tuesday is one more big check from his rich uncle Scrooge McAdelson.

(Not that Gingrich is going to be the nominee! It’s still going to be Romney unless something unprecedentedly hilarious happens at the convention.)

CPAC also uninvited the John Birch Society, which had made a triumphant return to mainstream conservative acceptance in 2010, when they co-sponsored the conference.

But! While the Birchers and the open homosexualists are no longer welcome, there is still room for multiple outspoken white nationalists!

The National Review’s John Derbyshire, a stock “pervert Tory” character from a Martin Amis novel sprung to life and given a sinecure at the National Review, is hosting a panel on “multiculturalism” (boo hiss) featuring two of America’s most detestable sacks of shit: Peter Brimelow, founder of white supremacist site VDARE, and Robert Vandervoort, the director of some sort of “don’t make me press one for English” nativist group and a white nationalist from way back.

CPAC organizers are like, we didn’t specifically organize this panel ourselves so whatever, but they are not canceling the panel, because the conservative movement has always quietly set a place at the table for their white supremacist allies when they get together for Thanksgiving. And after everyone says grace (and sings “God Bless America” and the national anthem and does the Pledge of Allegiance) comes the ceremonial declaration that liberals are the real racists, for inventing welfare.

The Derbyshire, Brimelow, and Vandervoort (these names!) panel is called “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity,” and the fact that these panelists are all well-compensated members in good standing of the conservative movement instead of shrieking their “defense of Western Civilization” nonsense for free from a bench outside a subway station does suggest that something has gone wrong with the American experiment. (I think we let too many racist British people enter the country and steal our right-wing think tank and magazine contributor jobs, personally.)

I am guessing the panel will feature at least one “why is there no white history month” joke.

CPAC’s biggest draw today was the speech by Marco Rubio, who many expect to be Mitt Romney’s eventual running mate, because Republicans think he’ll appeal to the voters they accuse of poisoning American identity with their insufficiently Western European heritages.

Santorum was also the recent beneficiary of one of those slightly fishy Rasmussen polls showing him besting the president nationally 45% to 44%.

Some pundits are already preemptively deflating the hype they haven’t even bothered to fully build up surrounding the not-yet-transpired Santorum victory. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York predicts a good day for Santorum, but notes that both the Gingrich and Santorum campaigns are praying for the other one to just give up already so they can consolidate the anti-Romney vote. It ends, sadly: “it’s entirely possible that neither Santorum nor Gingrich will pull ahead in the race to challenge Romney.”

But if there’s one factor (besides the political press’ institutional bias in favor of long, drawn-out races) that could actually give Santorum a real advantage in the near future, it’s the surprising number and variety of “culture war” issues that have suddenly become very prominent.

There is today’s Ninth Circuit ruling affirming the striking down of California’s gay marriage ban (Newt Gingrich, having already promised to have the entire Ninth Circuit tarred and feathered, is predictably excited). There is the Susan G. Komen for the Cure meltdown over grants to Planned Parenthood, which culminated in the minting of a brand new conservative martyr as Karen Handel resigned to take stock of the think tank and cable news opportunities available (possible VP pick?). And there is the most obviously manufactured of the current outrages, over the Obama administration’s decision to require that employers cover contraception and birth control in health insurance plans, even if those employers are people who subscribe to the Catholic Church’s morally repugnant and indefensible anti-contraception policy. (Which most American Catholics don’t.)

All of these, most of all the last one, are perfect stories for a candidate like Rick Santorum, so long as this remains a contest to win over outraged elderly ultra-conservatives. And indeed, Santorum has launched an unfair-ish attack on Romney, accusing him of forcing Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception. Santorum wants the voters to know that he’s always been the candidate most dedicated to protecting women from the responsibility of having any agency whatsoever over their role in the reproductive process!

(Would it be conspiratorial to note that these divisive cultural issues began attracting a great deal of right-wing attention very soon after the release of a positive jobs report? A little bit, probably.) (Also: Remember when the Tea Party meant the GOP was going all libertarian and abandoning social issues? Ha, ha.)

Not that you should take any of this to mean that Santorum’s good day (which has not yet happened and still may not actually happen) is indicative of anything other than a fickle minority of conservative voters drifting toward whomever was least recently savaged in the press and in attack ads. But if you note your favorite anti-Romney conservative pundits and bloggers rather suddenly talking a lot more about contraception and the gay agenda, don’t be too surprised. Santorum’s positions on these issues horrifies most Americans (“I will force rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term!” is not a general election winner), but most Americans don’t vote in Missouri Republican primary elections.