GOP convention: A festival of hypocrisy — without shame
It’s Still Halftime in America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT
Tampa, Fla.
I sat through three days of speeches at the Republican convention here, but I confess that my mind often drifted off to thinking about Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon.
Armstrong’s passing really touched me, especially coinciding as it did with this election. Why? Because the America that launched Armstrong was an America that was embarked on a great and inspiring journey — one that spawned breakthroughs in science, medicine, computing and physics that made our country, and the world, a better place. What journey are we on today? Balancing the budget? Expanding health insurance? These are vital tools, but healthy to go where and balanced to do what?
I came to the G.O.P. convention hoping to hear the Republican answer. Or, more specifically, I came to Tampa looking for Mitt Romney’s Etch A Sketch, and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.
Sitting through all the speeches, it was clear to me that people who think Romney, having accepted the nomination, is now going to pivot to the center are fooling themselves. There is no organic connection between Romney and the G.O.P. base. You could feel it in the hall. He is renting the party to fulfill his dream of becoming president, and they’re renting him to get rid of President Obama. But this is not Romney’s party. I don’t see him taking it back to his moderate past.
Ann Romney promised, in her speech, that her husband “will not fail.” But she never said at doing what. That’s not an accident. As Paul Ryan demonstrated, he and his band of Ayn Randians will employ any lies needed to disguise their true agenda of dismantling the New Deal. Ryan implied that Obama had failed to save a General Motors plant that was actually closed under George W. Bush; he blasted Obama for not taking responsibility for our job and fiscal deficits, while not acknowledging a whit of G.O.P. responsibility for the Bush-era spending recklessness that dug these holes; Mitt Romney lashed out at Obama for leading from behind on foreign policy and then virtually ignored foreign policy in his speech. Almost every G.O.P. speaker boasted of their immigrant roots, while the party remains the biggest opponent of immigration reform. It was a festival of hypocrisy — without shame. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Neil Newhouse, the lead Romney pollster, told critics. Say what?
(More here.)
Tampa, Fla.
I sat through three days of speeches at the Republican convention here, but I confess that my mind often drifted off to thinking about Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon.
Armstrong’s passing really touched me, especially coinciding as it did with this election. Why? Because the America that launched Armstrong was an America that was embarked on a great and inspiring journey — one that spawned breakthroughs in science, medicine, computing and physics that made our country, and the world, a better place. What journey are we on today? Balancing the budget? Expanding health insurance? These are vital tools, but healthy to go where and balanced to do what?
I came to the G.O.P. convention hoping to hear the Republican answer. Or, more specifically, I came to Tampa looking for Mitt Romney’s Etch A Sketch, and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.
Sitting through all the speeches, it was clear to me that people who think Romney, having accepted the nomination, is now going to pivot to the center are fooling themselves. There is no organic connection between Romney and the G.O.P. base. You could feel it in the hall. He is renting the party to fulfill his dream of becoming president, and they’re renting him to get rid of President Obama. But this is not Romney’s party. I don’t see him taking it back to his moderate past.
Ann Romney promised, in her speech, that her husband “will not fail.” But she never said at doing what. That’s not an accident. As Paul Ryan demonstrated, he and his band of Ayn Randians will employ any lies needed to disguise their true agenda of dismantling the New Deal. Ryan implied that Obama had failed to save a General Motors plant that was actually closed under George W. Bush; he blasted Obama for not taking responsibility for our job and fiscal deficits, while not acknowledging a whit of G.O.P. responsibility for the Bush-era spending recklessness that dug these holes; Mitt Romney lashed out at Obama for leading from behind on foreign policy and then virtually ignored foreign policy in his speech. Almost every G.O.P. speaker boasted of their immigrant roots, while the party remains the biggest opponent of immigration reform. It was a festival of hypocrisy — without shame. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Neil Newhouse, the lead Romney pollster, told critics. Say what?
(More here.)
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