Eight votes later, we enter an age of weaponized money, backed by every branch of government and every super-PAC.

(Illustration by DonkeyHotey for The Politics Blog)

DES MOINES — Don't say I didn't warn you.

Rick Santorum's demi-victory speech last night was a masterpiece of his ongoing demagoguery on the topic of American blue-collar workers and American jobs, which is as transparently phony as almost everything else Jack Abramoff's old running buddy has been spouting on the subject the nation's moral decline and the decay of the political culture he sees all around him. (Is he ever going to tell us whether or not his beloved coal-miner grandfather belonged to a union? Last night, we learned that his grandfather ran afoul of "a company store" and that, upon his death, Rick thanked him "for digging freedom out with his two hands." Please send John L. Lewis my apologies in the Beyond.) It was also as flatly theocratic an address as you are likely to hear from a major candidate for president in any party for quite a while. Steve Schmidt on Liberal MSNBC called it a "major-league speech" and pointed out that it hit the heartwood of Republican primary voters. More's the pity.

(Over on Liberal MSNBC, Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews are both in a semi-swoon for Santorum's faux-proletarian blathering. Matthews called the speech an example of the "politics of the spirit." Al Sharpton called it "almost poetic." Gawd, no.)

Santorum's demi-victory in the Iowa caucuses is going to prompt an awful lot of revisionist history as regards the influence of the new political dynamic created by the Citizens United decision. It is going to be interpreted as a victory for "retail politics" over the power of unaccountable corporate money that the misbegotten decision has unleashed, swamping the system here and essentially turning Newt Gingrich's campaign into little more than a vehicle for his own personal vengeance. Not that this won't be entertaining, but Santorum's year-long schmoozing with the evangelical base here garnered him exactly the same amount of support that Willard Romney managed to produce with a few weeks of an advertising blitz. That would not have been possible in 2008. We will see going forward how far Santorum's sweater-vest and his gooey piety gets him when he starts wearing the bullseye, which should begin about 22 seconds from now.

(And if you're keeping score at home, there were 105 votes cast by a bunch of pranksters for either Herman Cain or Buddy Roemer. Those people decided the Iowa caucuses.)

The American political system is profoundly deformed. It is deformed by the now limitless power of unaccountable corporate money. (I would remind folks that, in 1972, unaccountable corporate money in a Republican campaign safe was what the Watergate scandal ultimately was all about.) Nothing that happened last night in any way changes that. The American political system is also deformed by the nearly limitless power of concocted narrative, reinforced by an elite political media locked into a self-contained, airless universe, and completely incapable of recognizing a luxurious farce even when there right in the middle of it. For six months, we have heard from the more polite precincts of this universe that the Republican field is made up of second-raters. (Politico, The Daily Racing Form of that universe, ran a piece only just yesterday saying exactly that.) Rick Santorum's sudden ability to garner 25 percent of the Republican caucus voters in Iowa last night doesn't change that simply because it happened. When that unaccountable corporate money is the silent engine behind the creation and maintenance of concocted narrative, the system cannot prevail left to its own devices.

This is the beginning of a watershed election in the history of the country. It is the first presidential campaign that we have had since the turn of the last century that has to be contested while everyone involved has to cooperate in the fiction that the whole process isn't completely for sale.

I watched this happen in Iowa over the last three days, and I continue to be astonished why this isn't the only story being told. This is something epochal. It is something that happens very, very rarely. It is the dawn of the age of thoroughly weaponized money, encouraged by every branch of the national government, most especially including the judiciary. Remember back all those years when Barack Obama looked down at the justices from the podium in the House chamber and read them out for Citizens United, and Sam Alito shook his head and mouthed, "Not true" visibly on TV?

Not true?

In Iowa, Mitt Romney's super-PAC outspent the actual Romney campaign by a 2-1 margin.

Not true?

How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?

It moves forward now. A staggered frontrunner who has shown himself to be the best one of them at fighting on this new terrain, and an outright Papist nutter who thinks the states can and should ban birth control, and who loves all human life, except those lived happily by his fellow citizens who are gay, who he believes need to remain second-class citizens. Both of them confronting each other in a system that has become so sodden with anonymous corporate money that it would make liars out of the most sincere politicians who ever lived, which these two guys certainly are not. There is nothing to stop it. There are no sensible politicians who willingly would disarm themselves first. The election of the next president does not belong to the country any more. But we will pretend that it does. We are very good at that.

CATCH UP ON ALL OF THE POLITICS BLOG'S COVERAGE FROM IOWA THIS WEEK:

• Iowa Speeches: The Losers Get Crazy All of the Times

• Santorum-Mentum! But for New Hampshire?

• An Iowa Caucus Where Results Neither Flood Nor Trickle

• The Iowa Where No Candidates Come

• On the Stump, Governor Goodhair Stumps Himself

• Our Mr. Brooks Goes on Expedition to the Santorium

• Santorum's War Against Women, Continued

• Stuff in Politico That Makes Me Want to Guzzle Antifreeze, Field of Mediocrity Edition

• The Incredible Hulking Newt Gingrich Comes Out to Play

• Romney, Charlatan on the Mount, Finds His Sweet Spot

• Santorum Salad for One, Please!

• Fun With Cain, Barbour, Daniels, and Palin!

• Beyond The Kardashian Thing, Romney's Obama Lie

• The Truth Inside Romney's Swift Boat Moment

• The Great Ron Paul Opening of 2012 Ends in Iowa

• Rick Santorum, Twitching Demagogue of the Fake Iowa

• In Iowa, Clown Car Hits Bumps on Super-PAC Highway

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io