There is no doubt, that thanks to Clint and the republicans, the chair is now the most famous piece of furniture in America. (Mitt, if you plan to run the country like you did your convention; I think we might be in some serious trouble.)
The chair was supposed to represent Obama, but I think that if Obama let the chair debate for him against Mitt, the chair will win. Actually, I would vote for the chair over Mitt. At least the chair has a stronger back bone than Mitt. And, unlike Mitt, we know that the chair will always stay the same.
But again, enough about the damn chair. The convention last night wasn't about the chair; it was about Mitt.
Having said that, I would like to make a public service announcement to Mitt Romney and his friends in the republican party: Ladies and gentlemen, the COLD WAR is over, and it has been over for some time now.
Mitt pretty much tried to bring it back in his speech last night by threatening Putin and the rest of the Russians. Honestly Mitt, I think that the Russians are too busy making money to care what some guy from Utah with the B9 like movements have to say about their standing in the world. Mitt also let it be known that when he is president he will show The Supreme Leader and the rest of those Iranians who is boss. Good luck with that. I think that Mitt will find that if (and that's a big if) he finds himself occupying the most powerful position on earth; he will see that things are a little different when the realities of the world starts closing in on him. Those daily national security briefs will give him a quick reality check.
But it's not only the cold war blunder; the repeating of the republican lies about Obama apologizing for America on foreign soil, (He did not) and the one about Obama raising taxes on the middle class (He did not) was a bit much, even for a republican giving a political speech.
Then, of course, there was this beauty:
"I have a plan to create 12 million jobs."
Here are the FACTS:
"This sounds ambitious - but it's not impossible. To do this in his first term,
as Romney promises, would require creating 250,000 jobs per month for four
years. In July, the economy added 163,000 jobs. There are not signs that that
number will shoot up by 100,000 jobs per month anytime soon, but the economy has
gone through periods of such job creation, most recently during the Clinton
administration. And as the Washington Post points
out, Moody's Analytics predicts
12 million jobs by 2016, no matter who sits in the Oval Office. Romney says
he'll get there through spending cuts and lower taxes."
I watched Mitt's speech last night, and now I regret it. Not because of how bad it was, but because it's an hour of my life that I will never get back.
I should have just read Jonathan Bernstein's article in the Post.
Mitt Romney’s speech Thursday, as I think Nate Silver tweeted halfway through, was a generic Republican speech — perfect for the generic Republican candidate he’s been since Day One of his second White House run.
Everything in it was perfunctory: the biographical section (which was weirdly interrupted by a digression into Neil Armstrong and the space race and by a call-out to every elected Republican woman they could scrape up — the whole thing seemed to have a case of attention deficit disorder); the five-point economic program; the foreign policy section; the stirring rhetoric at the end; and, certainly, the delivery.
No, that’s not an entirely bad thing. If there was a great moment in it, I sure didn’t hear it; several nice lines, but none that resonated. Perhaps the only memorable thing at all was a nice story about his parents’ romance, but it was surely no match for, say, the story of Chelsea Clinton falling off the bed when she unlearned gravity. Romney’s life story, as he told it, was appealing enough — striking off on his own rather than following in his father’s footsteps, a story that was a dead ringer for George Herbert Walker Bush’s life story except for the war heroism and the real adventurism in Bush’s move to Texas. But, again, that’s okay.
The theme of this convention wasn’t to sell the American people on Mitt Romney, much less his rarely-mentioned plans for public policy. No, even during the parade of testimonials to Romney that took up much of today’s proceedings, Romney himself was only occasionally the focus — the Olympic athletes did an excellent job of selling patriotism, but only sometimes appeared to remember that the point was to humanize Romney.
Both of those themes showed up in Romney’s speech tonight, and while he’s not capable of really making them soar — and, again, the structure of the thing failed to really bring it out very well anyway — they were probably good enough. Not that it means that Romney will necessarily win, but it does probably mean that he will get what he could coming out of the convention, moving a bit closer to achieving whatever the fundamentals of the contest would predict.
A generic speech and a generic convention for a generic Republican candidate."
It all makes you kind of long for the chair.
Everything in it was perfunctory: the biographical section (which was weirdly interrupted by a digression into Neil Armstrong and the space race and by a call-out to every elected Republican woman they could scrape up — the whole thing seemed to have a case of attention deficit disorder); the five-point economic program; the foreign policy section; the stirring rhetoric at the end; and, certainly, the delivery.
No, that’s not an entirely bad thing. If there was a great moment in it, I sure didn’t hear it; several nice lines, but none that resonated. Perhaps the only memorable thing at all was a nice story about his parents’ romance, but it was surely no match for, say, the story of Chelsea Clinton falling off the bed when she unlearned gravity. Romney’s life story, as he told it, was appealing enough — striking off on his own rather than following in his father’s footsteps, a story that was a dead ringer for George Herbert Walker Bush’s life story except for the war heroism and the real adventurism in Bush’s move to Texas. But, again, that’s okay.
The theme of this convention wasn’t to sell the American people on Mitt Romney, much less his rarely-mentioned plans for public policy. No, even during the parade of testimonials to Romney that took up much of today’s proceedings, Romney himself was only occasionally the focus — the Olympic athletes did an excellent job of selling patriotism, but only sometimes appeared to remember that the point was to humanize Romney.
Both of those themes showed up in Romney’s speech tonight, and while he’s not capable of really making them soar — and, again, the structure of the thing failed to really bring it out very well anyway — they were probably good enough. Not that it means that Romney will necessarily win, but it does probably mean that he will get what he could coming out of the convention, moving a bit closer to achieving whatever the fundamentals of the contest would predict.
A generic speech and a generic convention for a generic Republican candidate."
It all makes you kind of long for the chair.