Rick Santorum will not be ignored:

Rick Santorum lambasted Rick Perry as a lightweight on Israel policy Tuesday, dismissing Perry’s speech in New York as boilerplate rhetoric crafted by political handlers.

This more or less echoes Jennifer Rubin’s complaint from a few days ago that Perry could not possibly have written the WSJ op-ed published under his name, because his foreign policy views are so “rudimentary.” Rubin and Santorum are probably right that Perry didn’t write the op-ed or the speech, and it is almost certainly true that he is reading from a foreign policy script that someone else prepared for him. I assume that is a major part of the appeal that Perry has for hawkish Republicans. Somewhat like Bush, he will adopt and recite whatever his advisers decide to give him, and there will be no danger that this will conflict with any strong pre-existing views. Just as Bush’s supporters argued in 1999-2000, Perry’s boosters will invoke the importance of having the “right instincts,” and dismiss the importance of specialized or in-depth knowledge. As it turned out, instinctive decision-making and ignorance were not a winning combination.

It is a bit rich for Santorum to lecture anyone else on using boilerplate rhetoric, but it has to be very irritating for Santorum to have spent all these years toiling away as a reliable hawk only to see someone with a passing interest in foreign policy sweep past him. How would you feel if you were inanely warning about the “gathering storm” of the Iranian-Venezuelan axis for the last five years, and then you were somehow not taken seriously on foreign policy? Of course, it’s perfectly true that Perry is lightweight on this and all other foreign policy questions, but it doesn’t follow that the GOP need Santorum’s kind of “expertise.”

I also don’t know where he gets this stuff about Perry “flip-flopping” on Israel. The most recent line of attack against Perry for flip-flopping has targeted his somewhat confused position on Afghanistan, which hasn’t been flip-flopping so much as it has just been a jumble of nonsense, but it’s hard to see what position he held before on Israel that he has since abandoned. Did he previously favor annexing the Sinai, and then changed his mind? This Santorum-Perry quarrel is amusing partly for what it shows about the GOP: the fastest way for one of his rivals to try taking Perry down on foreign policy is to cast doubt on the intensity of his blind devotion maintaining the status quo on Israel policy.