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Fracking Rick Santorum could be your 45th president of the United States of America

Suddenly it seems like there's a new news cycle and a new lead story for Rick Santorum every hour, He says Obama wants to bring back the guillotine! He's shouting at Occupy protesters! He wants a constitutional amendment to require chastity belts! OK, I made up that last one, but in the bizzaro-world known as SantorumLand, suddenly anything seems possible.

Like his electiion as president.

Which is why people should be paying more attention to his views on fracking and less to his views on f.... oh nevermind.

As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, Santorum is one of the top U.S. Senate recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — and what makes those numbers so stunningly outsized is the fact that he remains one of the top Senate recipients even though the last time he ran for Senate was in 2006. Put another way, this is not a run-of-the-mill legislator who happened to get a few afterthought contributions from the industry; this is a guy who was such a sycophantic apostle of the industry that he received enough oil and gas money to keep him on the top-recipient list a full six years after he was voted out of office — that is, a full six years after he raised a single dollar for a Senate campaign. In baseball terms, it's the equivalent of Hank Aaron racking up so many home runs that he was able to hold the record well after he retired — only with Santorum, it's not home runs, it's oil and gas cash.

Will the oil gazillionaires get their man in White House? Probably not, but his chances of making to the Final Two and November Madness look better every day:

A third national poll has now shown former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) with a lead in the Republican primary race. A new survey commissioned by CBS News and the New York Times shows Santorum with 30 percent of GOPers, followed closesly by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 27, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) with 12 and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has faded to the back with 10 percent. Santorum's lead is within the margin of error, and therefore he and Romney are locked in a statistical dead heat.

That's why you need to get to know the real Rick Santorum.