As you would expect, Michael Ledeen likes Rick Santorum:

He foresaw that we would eventually have to confront the Iranian and Syrian regimes, and he was one of the first to point out the intercontinental anti-American alliance involving Iran, Syria, Russia, China, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Don’t forget Ecuador! It’s true that Santorum started talking about such a non-existent alliance many years ago, and he continues to talk about it today. That might be “prescient and gutsy” if it weren’t delusional and unfounded. It is not prescient to be consistently paranoid about non-existent threats. It’s just embarrassing, and I would think that an advocate for Santorum would want to de-emphasize just how absurd Santorum can be on foreign policy. Then again, this is Ledeen we’re talking about.

Since Ledeen makes so much of the story of Santorum’s grandfather, it might be worth mentioning that “Grandpa Pietro” fled Italy in the 1920s because he was a communist at the time:

But the elder Santorum matriarch doesn’t understand why he [Santorum] has diverged so far from the family’s longtime political stance. “In Riva del Garda his grandfather Pietro and uncles were ‘red communists’ to the core,” writes Oggi journalist Giuseppe Fumagalli, likening the family to “Peppone” after a famous fictional Italian communist mayor who fought against an ultraconservative priest known as Don Cammillo and about which a popular television series is based.

If Santorum’s grandfather believed that “America would be the last line of defense for freedom and virtue,” my guess is that his definitions of freedom and virtue were probably very different from what most Americans mean by them.