Ronald Reagan issued the edict known as the Republican Eleventh Commandment:

"Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican."

That goes even more so in referring to the patron saint of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan himself. Without reference to actual facts of Reagan's presidency, Republicans have eagerly attempted to drape the mantle of Saint Ronnie upon them.

But not Rick Santorum:

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum committed one of the gravest sins in Republican politics on Wednesday evening by knocking the revered former President Ronald Reagan at a packed town hall meeting.

While addressing America’s entitlement crisis at his first New Hampshire event since his stunning near-victory in the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday, Santorum said Reagan contributed to the entitlement crisis by pushing Social Security’s sustainability issues down the road instead of dealing with them head-on in the 1983 bipartisan deal to fix Social Security.

I don't know, maybe this is an eleventy dimensional chess move on the part of Santorum, but I just can't imagine how he thinks he will pick up votes by dissing Reagan, mighty deity of all that is bright and good within the GOP.

In point of fact, it appears to me that the cracks in his support are already showing and growing larger. You know things aren't going well when the official propaganda...er, business news channel of the GOP is likening you more to big government-loving Hillary Clinton:

Ouch. It's not easy to come back from that kind of conservative slapdown. Of course, if more than a dozen or so viewers watched Fox Business, it might actually have an impact.