Newsflash! Rick Santorum endorsed pro-choice Arlen Specter over pro-life Pat Toomey in the 2004 election cycle. In case you were living under a rock you may not have known this.

And despite all the years of pro-life service in the House and Senate, Rick Santorum is disqualified from ever being considered “pro-life” and is never ever no way not even a little bit to be considered fit for public office ever ever again. And any talk that Rick Santorum might make a better President than pro-abortion Barack Obama is hogwash. They’re essentially the same. Santorum=Obama. Got it?

That seems to be a decent amount of the talk filling the comboxes around the blogosphere right now. And I don’t agree with it at all. Many pro-lifers haven’t gotten over their disillusionment and disappointment of Santorum’s 2004 endorsement. I too was terribly disappointed in Santorum at the time. I believed and still believe it was the wrong thing to do.

But last year in an interview with the Spectator, Santorum admitted the endorsement was a mistake.

“In retrospect, it was a mistake,” he said. “I’ve admitted that. But you’ve gotta understand what my thinking was at the time. We had a 51-49 majority in the Senate. George W. Bush was up for a tough re-election fight. My sole focus was, how do we secure our majority, related most importantly to how could we confirm up to three Bush nominees to the Supreme Court.

So let’s just get this right. Santorum’s decision to endorse Specter was one that would further the pro-life cause to get judges confirmed.

Remember, at the time of the endorsement Democrats were filibustering conservative federal judicial nominees and paying little or no political price. Republicans wanted to keep their slim majority and were afraid that Toomey, who didn’t have the name recognition he has now, wouldn’t win against a good campaigner in Democrat Congressman Joe Hoeffel.

If Toomey would’ve beaten Specter in the primary and lost in the general election we can’t know what would’ve become of the nominations of judges John Roberts or Samuel Alito. Santorum has said that Specter promised him that he would support George W. Bush’s judicial nominations. And he did. That support helped get Samuel Alito and John Roberts onto the Court. So one could argue that Santorum’s seeming defection helped put pro-lifers on the court.

I agree with Santorum that it was a mistake. It can be argued, however, that he did the wrong thing for the right reasons. I consider it a failing but the good news is that so does he. Politicians, like all of us, make mistakes. We’re electing human beings who make mistakes sometimes. But Rick Santorum made a mistake for the right reasons. His core principles are aimed at advancing the culture of life.

And let’s face it, there’s not an infinite pool of candidates. It’s Santorum, Perry, Romney or Gingrich right now. Thank goodness those other guys haven’t made any mistakes.

Hey, and if we don’t like any of them, there’s always Obama.