I aspire to snark, but there are times when one must defer to a master of the art. Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been on a tear lately. Today he writes in the form of a letter to the Allegheny County’s Office of Children, Youth and Families, the local child-abuse people.

… the television ads featuring the children of Sen. Rick Santorum testifying to his paternal greatness prompted me to contact CYF. The sight of those poor devils conscripted into their father’s doomed re-election campaign moved me to tears.

The ad opens with Johnny “Damian” Santorum telling a big lie: “My dad’s opponents have criticized him for moving us to Washington so we could be with him more.”

Johnny’s disingenuous characterization is followed by Daniel “The Hammer” Santorum’s glib summary of the Penn Hills cyber school kerfuffle: “And they criticized us for attending a Pennsylvania public school over the Internet.”

Oh, out of the mouths of babes came two big lies. Never mind that the criticism Johnny alluded to wasn’t about Mr. Santorum’s “family values,” but his willingness to saddle the taxpayers of Pennsylvania with the cost of educating his kids when they now live in Virginia. [snip]

It’s a remarkable performance for allegedly “apolitical” children who, in all likelihood, were probably coerced with threats of withheld porridge and other necessities, just like in a Dickens novel.

Still, the question remains given the level of taunting his children would be exposed to: What possessed Mr. Santorum to drag six of his 15 kids into the already heated Senate battle with Bob Casey Jr.?

Does Mr. Santorum have any concept of how much shame his kids will feel once they’re exposed to people and opinions outside the Santorum compound? [snip]

For the sake of the kids already damaged flacking for their father and the kids yet to be exploited waiting in the wings, I call upon you, the heavy-handed social workers of CYF to do your duty.

Norman is gonna catch hell for this one, you just know—I left out some of the more cutting parts—but neither he nor I would have said one word about Santorum’s breeding habits or resulting litters if Santorum hadn’t dragged them out to be public figures in his advertising. And made them tell lies on teebee.

Bad move, Sen. FrothyMixMaster. And of course the conclusion points out the solution. It won’t help these poor 217 children, God knows; only age and emancipation, and possibly changes of names, retirement to monasteries, etc., can do that—but his conclusion sums up what we should do to the only member of the family we have any control over:

Dear Lord, this shameless exploitation must stop. As a letter published in today’s PG artfully states: “Let’s do Sen. Santorum and his family a favor and allow him to spend more time at home with the family, maybe as a full-time dad.”

Ayup.