Well then. Wasn’t that just speshul? Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin dished out the nastiness and the lies and the personal attacks with a giant spoon last night.
My take on it:
* Romney is trying to be Ronald Reagan so hard that it’s actually painful to watch. Oh, and he fails, too.
* Huckabee was a big disappointment. He usually gives a good speech and a funny speech but he was off his game. He’s also usually not nearly so nasty and personal in his attacks. But he had a job assignment and he went at it with vigor for sure.
* Rudy Giuliani had spittle flying from his bald head. All I could think of during his speech is that, if you slapped a swastika on his shoulder and a Colonel Klink helmet on his head, he’d be a very convincing Nazi commandant. That image certainly would match is bitter rhetoric.
* Palin was definitely nastier than I thought she would be. How she can go from the “everyday soccer mom” with a cute-as-a-button family to a nasty, acid-throwing jerk the next was impressive. Listening to her speech, you couldn’t help but understand that it was written by a committee of people and the parts she had nothing to do with were very obvious.
* Palin also repeated the lie, for the third time, that she was against the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere” when the truth is that she supported it just fine until it became politically expedient not to.
All of them filled their speeches with lies and gross exaggerations. The AP did a pretty good job of spelling some of the worse ones out. Time magazine’s Joe Klein calls out Huckabee’s mistakes HERE.
I also can’t help but giggle over the McCain campaign complaining now that the media has started paying attention to them. This after whining for so long about how Obama was getting all the attention. Now they are PISSED at the media. That’s rich! Joe Klein has a great essay about this:
There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.
Zing.
The sarcastic and nasty flavor of last night’s convention surprised even me and I EXPECT the Republicans to do this kind of stuff. But they were very over the top and I have a feeling that it’s going to put off a lot of the independent, undecided voters that I’ve been talking to while phoning and canvassing for the Obama campaign. I think one of the commenters over at AMERICAblog put it best:
Only at the RNC can people who one night before asked the country to do service for their country then now boo when Giuliani mentions community organizing.
I’m just sayin’..
