Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has finally caught on to what the rest of the wired universe has being snickering about for years: the secret meaning of his last name. For those of you living under a rock with no wi-fi, the virulently homophobic bigot was lampooned by activist and sex columnist Dan Savage for his seemingly unremitting dehumanizing attacks on the gay community. Hilariously enough, Mr. Savage took it upon himself to liken the former senator’s last name to a byproduct of anal sex. Go ahead, Google it…I’ll wait.

In a 2003 interview with the Associated Press, Santorum said that “consenting adults do not have a constitutional right to privacy, and that polygamy, adultery, and sodomy undermine society and the family.” Big mistake, Senator! As a result, Dan Savage asked his readers to coin a definition for “Santorum” which would be used to greatly offend the Senator, announcing the winner as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” Sure it’s gauche and sophomoric, but then again, so are politicians.

Flash forward to the year 2011 in which Rick Santorum is running for President, and the former Senator is not happy that Google automatically directs people to this crude neologism when his name is put into the search engine. Obviously, Google cannot censor search results specifically to please one random politician, but Rick Santorum feels that the automated monopoly is part of some pernicious conspiracy to embarrass him. Further, he feels that the folks at Google could do something to fix it if they really wanted to.

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it. If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

First of all, Mr. Santorum, you do a superb job of embarrassing yourself each and every time you open your mouth and utter some religious psychobabble about how tax-paying, consenting adults wish to live their lives in the privacy of their bedrooms.

Second of all, Joe Biden got ruthlessly criticized and put under the microscope when he kinda said something in private meeting, only to be misquoted later and face a fusillade of criticism. I’m referring, of course, to published reports that claimed the gaffe-prone VP compared Tea Party-linked lawmakers to “terrorists” during a closed-door meeting on the debt ceiling talks, when in actuality he said obstructionist Republicans were “acting like terrorists” in their outright refusal to work with the President on raising the debt ceiling. Now, if Vice President Biden were to, say, make speeches in which he compared gays marrying each other to bestiality, he would be crucified.

Lastly,whatever happened to the idea of keeping the Government from interfering in the private sector? The former Senator’s argument seems to advocate the notion that it’s perfectly okay for the government to go after the private sector when it hurts certain people’s feelings. Kinda like how Tea Party Republicans want big government for “certain” people.

Quite honestly, if Mr. Santorum wishes to fix his “Google problem” he might consider being likable, not saying totally insane things regarding the private lives of consenting adults, and actually start offering sound alternatives to how he would fix the country versus those with whom he’s running to unseat Obama. As to his Joe Biden comparison, if Joe Biden were as much as an abysmal failure as Rick Santorum, maybe he too would be whining about a “Google problem.” What he wouldn’t be is the Vice President of the United States.