From the Weekly Standard Blog, and a post by Stephen Hayes, Hayes starts out what feels like a pretty fair assesment of the situation.

As John McCain looks more and more like the frontrunner (for now) in the Republican presidential race, criticism of his views has intensified. And no one has been more critical of the Arizona senator than his former colleague Rick Santorum. Santorum has taken to talk radio shows in recent days to trash McCain as too liberal. It’s not a new argument. Santorum made it back in April, too, when McCain first announced.

Then the rest of  the article breaks down into one long high school cheerleader gossip session about who is more conservative than another.

 I agree with many (probably most) of Santorum’s policy critiques of McCain, but Santorum is an odd guy to be lecturing others about conservative purity. When many conservatives were pushing former representative Pat Toomey as a conservative alternative to left-wing Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, Santorum was not. He was one of Specter’s biggest boosters and many Pennsylvania conservatives still blame Santorum for Specter’s continued presence in the Senate. (Specter’s lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is 44; Santorum’s is 88. John McCain’s is 82.)

Weird. I wonder where Matheson’s conservative rating would be if he were in the Senate? Anyway,  the painfully long conclusion to this nearly unreadable post is that conservatives spend a lot of time stabbing each other in the back. HEY! Democrats do that too! Like breakfast at Tiffany’s: Well, that the one thing we got. Isn’t that enough to build a meaningful circular backstabbing consensus?