photo via politico.com

It looks like everyone should just shut the heck up about Rick Santorum leaving the Republican presidential race, because the boy is on fire.

On Saturday he topped Mitt Romney in the Louisiana primary, where his conservative credentials played well.

On Sunday in Wisconsin he slapped down a New York Times reporter who asked him to clarify his statement calling Mitt Romney “the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.”

Whoa! HEY! Wait a minute! Time out! BULL HOCKEY!

What he said, Jeff Zeleny — you idiot — is that Mitt Romney is the worst Republican to run against the president on the issue of healthcare. Okay? Rick Santorum still believes the likely nominee Mitt Romney is the worst Republican in that respect, but you have no right to distort his words by asking him — with your greedy questions — if he meant the worst Republican to run in general or the worst Republican to run on that super-huge issue. I mean, really. In the words of Rick Santorum: “Come on man, what are you doing?”

Opponents from the Romney campaign and elsewhere have seized on this “tantorum” as evidence of the candidate’s not-ready-for-primetime demeanor, but we believe that any doubts about the presidential-ness of Santorum’s outrage ought to be put aside.

Surely we all remember this famous exchange between the recently-inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a reporter from the New York Times who took one of his remarks out of context:

NYT: President Roosevelt, do you really think we have nothing to fear?

FDR: . . . What? What did you just say?

NYT: You said that we have nothing to fear. You said–

FDR: –What speech did you listen to?

NYT: Are you saying we don’t have to fear poison ivy and black widow spiders and eating raw cookie dough and slivers and–

FDR: NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF YOU MORON. Stop. Distorting. My words. It’s bull#@$%. . . . C’mon man, what are you doing?