This editorial is addressed to all you retirees out there who are happy to collect your Social Security checks and think you are pretty conservative. Actually, you are leftist radicals.

No doubt, as you are reading this, you are humming a few bars of a Joan Baez song. Perhaps you are strumming your guitar or adjusting the flowers in your hair (or where it used to be), and admiring your Che Guevara poster.

Doesn't sound like you? Well, if you like Social Security, that is odd indeed. Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania knows a thing or two about Social Security -- he's the head of a Senate subcommittee devoted to the subject -- and in an interview this week he referred to Social Security as "the sacred cow of the [political] left."

The senator was expressing his frustration with the White House for not talking up earlier President Bush's plan to introduce personal retirement accounts and allowing critics to get the upper hand. In the face of widespread fears about the so-called reform, he is introducing legislation to guarantee that the benefits of people 55 or older would not be affected by other changes in the system. Of course, this would do nothing to address Social Security's projected shortfalls in the future -- which was ostensibly the major reason for changing the system in the first place.

Sen. Santorum doesn't get a few things. First, if Social Security is a sacred cow, it long ago ceased to be one just for the left. It is true that Democrats have led the fight to resist Mr. Bush's plan, but millions of Americans of all political persuasions have come to depend on the system in their retirement.

That fact is linked to the second observation: Because no wide consensus exists to destroy Social Security in order to save it, Mr. Bush's plan has gone nowhere. It is not likely to go much further. With the economy strained by hurricanes and war, this is no time to be betting on private accounts, especially if the cost of so-called reform runs up the deficit further.

In Sen. Santorum's mouth, the words "sacred cow" are not meant to be flattering to Social Security, even without a reference to the political left. In his wacky world, sacred cows are to be booted. It's something to remember next year, even if you aren't a guitar-strumming, sandal-wearing retiree whom the senator seems to imagine are the system's only friends.