Rick Santorum is catching up to Mitt Romney in the Republican polls; by some counts he has a chance to win the Michigan primary, which is nominally Mitt Romney’s home state.

American Research Group had Santorum up 33%-27% on Romney, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (21%) and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas (12%) trailing them. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Another survey firm, Public Policy Polling, had Santorum ahead with a far greater margin, 39% to 24%, for Romney. Paul was next with 12% and Gingrich last with 11%. That poll had a smaller sample size and a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

One poll could be an outlier; two is a trend.

By some counts, Rick Santorum is the eleventh candidate to top the GOP polling if you go back to last spring when no one was seriously talking about the race; Donald Trump, f’r chrissake. Frankly, I’ve lost count; at this point you could tell me that Teddy the Wonder Lizard had won the Iowa caucuses and I’d believe it. So what we’re seeing is yet another candidate — this one even further to the right than anyone else — who has a chance to win the nomination.

And when I say “further to the right,” I’m not kidding. Here’s a quote from Mr. Santorum (via Andrew Sullivan) on the matter of individual freedoms.

This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

So how about that for your Valentine’s Day wake-up call: a candidate who believes that the government has the right to dictate your every move. Smaller government isn’t more freedom; it’s the road to Sodom and Gomorrah. And the only reason they’re against imposing their version of Sharia law is because they’d get sued for copyright infringement by the Taliban.

And he’s leading by fifteen points in Michigan.

I still think that Mitt Romney will be the nominee, but by the time he gets to the convention in August, the clown car parade will have become the Concours d’Elegance of lunacy and he will either be forced to pick one of these bug-eyed Torquemadas as his running mate, or, as Charlie Pierce suggests, do another one of his pirouettes and come out as the Massachusetts Moderate that brings sanity back into the picture. The first choice would keep the base happy but drive off the independents, the women, the minorities, and anyone else who finds the idea of theocracy for breakfast unappealing. The second choice would be the smart move, but so far, there’s nothing to indicate that the GOP as currently rendered would ever go back to anywhere near the middle of the road. Hell, they’re so far down in the ditch that they can’t even see the shoulder.