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.
Agreed!
Mitt often says, ‘I am what I am.” He sounds like Popeye – sans the soul.
And the lesson we should learn from this is, ‘What you see is what you get.’
A rich, insecure, rich, entitled, rich, elitist, rich, pampered, rich, feckin’ DICK!
Did I mention that he’s rich?
And that’s his BEST feature.
It should be quite a show, particularly against the background of another hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast on the anniversary of Katrina, so we are all reminded of just what happens when we have a Republican in the White House when the storm, literal or metaphorical, hits.
My only concern is that they’ve completely abandoned any pretense to telling the truth, so I expect a barrage of Big Lies on network TV. We’ll hear that Obama is cutting the work requirement in welfare, that he’s cutting Medicare to pay for Obamacare, etc. We’ll hear that Mitt’s a flexible, funny guy with a real connection to the common man, and that trust-fund beneficiary Paul Ryan grew from hardscrabble origins and flipped burgers, so he knows what it’s like to work for a living, even if he’s been in DC for his adult life.
The Gulf Coast may be flooded by the storm, but the rest of us will be flooded with BS.
Many many years ago when I was in grade school we had a magazine called Highlights. It featured an assortment of games,puzzles and other childhood activities. One of the regularly feautured activities was a drawing where objects were incorporated into the drawing in such a way that they would be hidden to the casual observer,but could discovered with careful examination. That activity was always placed at the second to last page, and was titled..What’s wrong with this picture?( find the hidden objects).
That segment was the highlight of my Highlight magazine. But more than that, it imparted into me an almost haunting habit of always asking— what’s wrong with this picture? —when I sensed a situation where something was hidden beyond casual observation.
When I look at the situation in Tampa and see thousands of National Guard troops patroling with their M-16’s, armored vehicles stationed at every corner, miles of barricades, drones, warships, incarceration centers, missle defences, restricted areas…and every trapping of militarism… that haunting question of what’s wrong with this picture revisits me.
What I’m seeing in the streets of Tampa with armed security measures is the same thing I saw on the streets of Danang, Vietnam many many years ago…And it really sucks.
Hang on to your hats, folks. We’re going to hell in a hand basket…I want my country back!
I’ve felt all along that the Democrats/Obama could easily just sit back and let Romney defeat himself. I’ve also found it interesting that any ad launched by Democrats/Obama which does not praise, let alone completely agree with the content of a Romney ad is automatically labeled a “negative ad/attack ad” by Republicans.
I’ve also noticed that a policy, plan, course of action is favorable if advocated by a Republican but unfavorable, unacceptable even if advocated by a Democrat. Case in point: A number of years ago a woman appointed herself as an advocate, even champion of Paula Jones. Remember her? In the course of her public speaking engagements the woman talked little about ‘poor’ Paula but a lot about the evils of abortion.
A zealous? reporter who’d been following this woman around the country decided to do some snooping on the woman’s background and uncovered the fact that she’d had two abortions while in college.
He confronted the woman with his information. Her reply was something like, well, it would have been absolutely impossible to start a family at that time, would have been a terrible hardship on me and any child i might have, so I had no alternative. Her interesting and disturbing inability to recognize the hypocrisy of what she advocated was bad for other women but reasonable and necessary for her personally seems to characterize much of what we’re hearing today from Romney and Ryan – the very same policy when advocated by them is good but bad when advocated by a Democrat. Strange.
I knew more than a few moderate Northeastern Republicans (yes, they once existed) who were shocked and horrified by the 1992 Republican Convention spectacle, and voted for Clinton as a result. Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but I am certain you are right about the impact on the voting public of the right-wing id unleashed. And I agree with you that they are about to put on a repeat performance. They can’t help themselves. If enough people watch, it’s possible that Romney will get a post-convention reverse bounce and slide back in the polls.
@Stratplayer —
Not just moderate Republicans, either — I’m from a family of Southern whites, total red-state Republicans, but with lots of divorces in the family and plenty of stepparents, plenty of kids living with grandparents or family friends while parents got their acts together — and THEY were horrified by the Republicans in 1992. they did not turn out for Bill Clinton — but they didn’t turn out for George HW Bush either.
If we’re lucky, not only will Isaac pour some rain on the GOP parade, but even moreso on the leftie vocational protestors.