Daily Archives: August 27, 2012

Viguerie: Romney Attempts Takeover of His Own Convention

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I get all kinds of bizarre stuff in my email inbox, but this communication from Richard Viguerie is in a class by itself. It begins:

Romney’s Agents Attempt Coup at GOP Convention

Manassas, Virginia — “Grassroots conservatives have launched an unprecedented rules fight against an attempted coup by Mitt Romney at this year’s Republican National Convention,” announced Richard Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.

Ooo, sneaky Mittens. How dare the Republican nominee presumptive attempt a takeover of his own nominating convention? What is the world coming to?

Actually, what I’m hearing is that the Washington establishment is changing the convention rules on the fly so that they don’t have to seat potential troublemakers — e.g., Paulites and baggers — as delegates. Watch out for this.

The Video Everyone’s Talking About

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Tweety can be a clueless dork sometimes — well, most of the time — but once in a while he wakes up and actually says something worthwhile. Here he tears into Reince Priebus for resorting to racist dog whistling —

“You can play your games and giggle about it but the fact is your side playing that card. When you start talking about work requirements, you know what game you’re playing and everybody knows what game you’re playing. It’s a race card and yeah, if your name’s Romney, yeah you were well born, you went to prep school, yeah, brag about it. This guy has an African name and he’s got to live with it. Look who’s gone further in their life. Who was born on third base? Making fun of the guy’s birth certificate issue when it was never a real issue except for the right wing.”

Let Republicans Be Republicans

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I have advice that leftie vocational protesters will never take, but here goes anyway — When your opponent is voluntarily making a fool of himself in public, stay out of the bleeping way.

The Republican National Convention promises to be a hot mess. Evan McMorris-Santoro writes,

Unfortunately for the man who’s just days from finally sealing the deal and becoming the Republican presidential nominee, the Republican Party’s frayed edges are on full display here even as delegates wait for the actual convention to start.

The come-together moment follows a week that ripped open the wounds of the Republican primary that were supposed to be fully healed in time for Romney’s big party.

See also “A Party of Factions Gathers, Seeking Consensus.”

I know somebody’s going to say Republicans always put on a perfectly choreographed show and everyone’s going to snap into place as always, blah blah, and maybe that will happen. But they’ve got a candidate many of them don’t like who can’t get his message straight — he went back to bragging about his Massachusetts health care law this week, which infuriates a lot of them — and more so than in the past there are big factions of rightie activists who put ideology way over party, and who would rather lose than compromise. Which works for me.

Plus, it’s a fact that this year’s platform is the most extreme ever and nuttier than a peanut farm.

What happens at the conventions still can sway an election, IMO. The pundits may disagree, but I think the 1992 GOP convention helped elect Bill Clinton. Clinton was helped by Pat Buchanan’s social war address, Marilyn Quayle’s cringe inducing “I am better than Hillary” speech, and the poignant moment when Mary Fisher, infected with HIV, told the convention that “We have killed each other with our ignorance, our prejudice and our silence.” It was widely seen as a rebuke of the Republican Party, particularly after Buchanan’s hateful ranting about “homosexual rights.”

So I say let Republicans be Republicans. Let them be themselves, and let America see them for who and what they are. Just pass the popcorn.