Did you see that?

Rick Santorum's anal sex problem just made it into the pages of the New York Times.

And the credit goes to Maureen Dowd, who has not always been treated kindly in these pages.

Still, credit where credit is due.

Rick Santorum is getting a bit more attention, what with his dead-heat finish with Willard M. Romney in the Iowa caucuses this week, but attention isn't necessarily good for him.

As MoDo points out,

Not satisfied with mentioning homosexuality in the same breath as bestiality and pedophilia, as he did in 2003, Santorum tried to win over the kids by equating homosexuality with polygamy.

Maybe Santorum doesn't remember what it was like to be a college student, or maybe he just was never the kind of college student who talks back or disrespects his elders, but here's the response he got:

The grating Santorum was their worst nightmare of a bad teacher. He merely got booed; he’s lucky the kids didn’t TP his car or soap the windows.

But that might just show that Santorum has a tin ear when it comes to talking to college students; here comes Dowd's money quote:

When 17-year-old Rhiannon Pyle, visiting with her civics class from Newburyport, Mass., pressed Santorum on how he could believe that all men are created equal and still object to two men in love marrying, he began nonsensically frothing.

"So what?" you say? It's only a "so what" moment if you are unfamiliar with Santorum's anal sex problem.

You see, back when Santorum first started saying homosexuality was the same as "man on boy" or "man on dog" it offended a gay sex advice columnist named Dan Savage, who decided to retaliate by coming up with an appropriate definition for Santorum's name. After a poll of his readers Savage decided the appropriate definition for Santorum is "the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex."

Santorum doesn't like it. In fact, he hates it, and he's gone crying to Google to make it stop, but it won't stop. If you google Santorum the Dan Savage definition is likely to be the top link, and is pretty much guaranteed to be in the top two or three.

Now "frothy" is not a particularly common word, so when Maureen Dowd, a person who is undoubtedly familiar with the new definition of Santorum, uses "frothing" in referring to Santorum in a column about Rick Santorum and same-sex relationships, there is no way that's an accident.

So you go, MoDo!

By the way, in case you're wondering, one of the readers' pick comments in the Times had the same thought:

Frothing? As in the first Google entry for Santorum? Well, Maureen, you had me chuckling (even if it was a tad subtle).