Mitt's Debut

"This president can tell us it was someone else's fault. This president can tell us that the next four years he'll get it right, but this president cannot tell us that you are better off today than when he took office." Mitt Romney's convention address 8/30/2012.

Like much else that Romney and Ryan said, this statement is factually wrong. Things aren't great, but we are better off than we were when the financial system was imploding with the housing market. Further, although unemployment rose after Obama was inaugurated, it fell in response to his policies--just not far enough. The problem was that his policies were too timorous, in part because Obama made attempt after mistaken attempt to compromise with the GOP minorities in both the House and the Senate: mostly the Senate, where the latter wielded its filibuster veto.

His attempts were mistaken, because Mitch McConnell, Senate minority leader, had made it very clear that his party would do almost whatever it could to insure that Obama would be a one-term President.

Neither Romney, nor Ryan, nor any of the other so-called leaders in the GOP, are willing to admit it now, but they are at least as responsible for the parlous state of the nation as Obama. They blocked whatever initiatives Obama attempted to bring about a recovery of the economy their (and Clinton-Rubin's) extreme laissez-faire policies had brought to the brink.

The GOP's hypocrisy is extraordinary, so the string of falsehoods promulgated by Ryan and then Romney at the convention should not be surprising.

What I do find surprising is the lack of "message control" on the part of the most prominent participants in the Republican Convention. Only the lesser lights, like Susana Martinez and Ann Romney stayed on message: to promote Romney as their standard bearer. Aside from the disastrous "address" of Clint Eastwood, Republican stars like Chris Christie, and even Paul Ryan appeared at best lukewarm in their promotion of their putative nominee.

This leads me to wonder: perhaps Mitt isn't even the super-manager he claims, or perhaps the GOP isn't really uniting behind him, after all. Ron Paul hasn't endorsed him, Clint referred to him as "the other guy" and many others seemed to treat him as an afterthought.

Maybe, the huge financial advantage Republicans have gained from Citizens United and their billionaire "super-pacs" has made them careless. After all, Sheldon Adelson has said he'd spend "whatever it takes" to defeat Obama, so, why worry? They'll just smother the airwaves with their lies.

I hope enough people tune out their distortions, but this is a classic case of the selfish class attempting to take over what had been at best a limited democracy. If their class succeeds, the US, and the world, will look increasingly like the last, fumbling years of the western Roman Empire.