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"(if) you can’t put on a three hour television show, you can’t run the country"
Consider: when one runs for President there are only a few things over which the nominee has true total control. Really there are only two: the choice of a running mate, and the production of the wholly staged kabuki of the nominating convention. The Ryan selection was botched, just from a technical point of view – a Friday evening news dump, the awkward pas de deux in which Romney and Ryan both tried to assert that the Ryan plan wasn’t really the Romney one and so on. Leave aside the merits or not of Ryan as a running mate, just the way that the choice oozed out into public discussion was weak.
And now this. The convention was rough from the start—and while you surely can’t blame the Romneybots for Hurricane Isaac, Chris Christie’s giant raspberry, spraying Jersey bluster all over Ann Romney’s red dress was not exactly what the Cyborg/Grannie Starver ticket had in mind. Then you get to the mostly forgettable second day, made extraordinary by Paul Ryan’s delivery of a speech that was, in the end, an indigestible bolus of falsehood . As someone pointed out at a link I’ve now lost, you’d think a properly run convention would have given Ryan sufficient guidance to make the lies just a little less obvious—just enough to provide cover to the both-sides-do-it/boys-will-be-boys school of coverage. But noooo…with the result that what was supposed to be a day of media praise for Ryan’s extraordinary powers of intellect and his courageous embrace of hard truths…and of anticipation of the launch of the Romnoid’s Human Emulation software update…became instead a chorus of disdain—one that even reached the Fox News website!
Amazingly, all that pales before the my-eyes-deceive-me spectacle of Clint Eastwood trading implied obscenties with an empty chair…dragged out so long that the nominee himself was forced into that one true sin of convention production values: crossing over out of prime time into the local news slot.
Holy Rotini, FSM! that’s just elementary. Incredibly bad planning. Grotesque management. A failure not of ideas or character or of policy analysis or even emotional persuasion…but of the pure, basic demand that someone who wants to run something should, you know, actually do so.
...
Remember, Romney isn’t running on his record in Massachusetts because it (a) largely sucked and (b) because the point at which it didn’t—with the passage of Romneycare—is the one that he just doesn’t seem to recall. He isn’t running on Bain directly, because that record has messy details in it that accompany exercises in vampire capitalism. He can’t do much with the Olympics because, you know, he didn’t build that. So all that’s left is this general claim that he’s got the leader stuff down, that he can run things, that he’s a deciderer, and what he decides goes, and goes right.
And now this convention.
Seriously: you can’t put on a three hour television show, you can’t run the country. It’s as simple as that.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/08/31/a-simple-question-2/#more-113247
And now this. The convention was rough from the start—and while you surely can’t blame the Romneybots for Hurricane Isaac, Chris Christie’s giant raspberry, spraying Jersey bluster all over Ann Romney’s red dress was not exactly what the Cyborg/Grannie Starver ticket had in mind. Then you get to the mostly forgettable second day, made extraordinary by Paul Ryan’s delivery of a speech that was, in the end, an indigestible bolus of falsehood . As someone pointed out at a link I’ve now lost, you’d think a properly run convention would have given Ryan sufficient guidance to make the lies just a little less obvious—just enough to provide cover to the both-sides-do-it/boys-will-be-boys school of coverage. But noooo…with the result that what was supposed to be a day of media praise for Ryan’s extraordinary powers of intellect and his courageous embrace of hard truths…and of anticipation of the launch of the Romnoid’s Human Emulation software update…became instead a chorus of disdain—one that even reached the Fox News website!
Amazingly, all that pales before the my-eyes-deceive-me spectacle of Clint Eastwood trading implied obscenties with an empty chair…dragged out so long that the nominee himself was forced into that one true sin of convention production values: crossing over out of prime time into the local news slot.
Holy Rotini, FSM! that’s just elementary. Incredibly bad planning. Grotesque management. A failure not of ideas or character or of policy analysis or even emotional persuasion…but of the pure, basic demand that someone who wants to run something should, you know, actually do so.
...
Remember, Romney isn’t running on his record in Massachusetts because it (a) largely sucked and (b) because the point at which it didn’t—with the passage of Romneycare—is the one that he just doesn’t seem to recall. He isn’t running on Bain directly, because that record has messy details in it that accompany exercises in vampire capitalism. He can’t do much with the Olympics because, you know, he didn’t build that. So all that’s left is this general claim that he’s got the leader stuff down, that he can run things, that he’s a deciderer, and what he decides goes, and goes right.
And now this convention.
Seriously: you can’t put on a three hour television show, you can’t run the country. It’s as simple as that.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/08/31/a-simple-question-2/#more-113247
