Republican National Convention Day 1 or was it 2?

Did you see the Republican National Convention Convention speeches last night?  BORING.  I don’t know how I hung in there as long as I did for the late night Ann Romney and Chris Christie speeches, but I did, well almost.  The next day, today, I tuned into the Martin Bashir show on MSNBC and he pointed out the contrast between the two speeches and it was something that as I listened last night also struck me as odd, if not bizarre.  Ann said she wanted to talk about love and Christie who followed her speech contradicted this theme by saying we spend too much time as a country wanting to be loved.

It also struck me as quite odd that most of the speakers on day 1, or was it 2, who knows, simply talked about their own records as governors – how they balanced budgets, cut taxes, busted unions, took immigration into their own hands and so forth.  Rick “Saint”orum literally took the hand metaphor to the extreme, if you were listening closely, you’d have thought it sounded as creepy as I did.  You know for a minute there, I thought he was going to explode or spontaneously combust on stage.

Strangely, there was hardly a whisper about what Mitt had done as governor of Massachusetts.  Granted, there’s not much there for a Republican to champion, especially Romneycare, Mitt’s signature health care legislation, which is the model for Obamacare and I might add as a Massachusetts resident working quite well for Baystaters.  Nor was there much talk about Romney’s days at Bain Capital, and you would think this would have been a rallying cry for the GOP who believe in unfettered Ayn Randian capitalism.  And barely a peep about Mitt’s Olympic “turnaround” which was due in large part to government support – oops, can’t let that get out!  We did learn one thing we might not have know about Mitt and that was that he took Ann to a dance and got her home ok some 40 years ago, or whatever it was.

It was almost as if Mitt were an afterthought on a night devoted to celebrating republican leadership, a style characterized by the slogan – The Grand Old Party of No – no to reproductive rights, no to help for the poor, no to public assistance, no to unions, no to marriage equality, no to jobs, no to voting rights, no to the middle class, no to immigrants, no to the separation of church and state, no to NPR, no to regulations, no to science, no to darn near everything except more tax cuts for the wealthy (so much for the debt clock) and so on, and trust me, I could go on.  The Do Nothing congress dominated by republican obstructionism, rather than celebrating successes should be apologizing to the American people and begging for another chance to serve.

And the smug governors who want less government, and would have you believe they’d cede from the United States and form their own country, jump at the chance to get any and all the assistance available from the federal government for clean energy projects, disaster assistance, education grants and the like. I could go on here and expose more of the hypocrisy, but I don’t have the stomach for it.