A party with a mission, they gathered in Tampa to present
their candidate and themselves in the most favorable light possible. Disciplined and determined, they planned,
four years in advance, to show the
country here and now they are infinitely more fit to govern than the candidate
and the party the people had elected. You
have to ask—at least I have to—if a party that plans four years in advance to
hold such an all-important presidential-nominating national convention in a
hurricane-prone region during hurricane season after its previous national convention was delayed by a hurricane in
the same time frame is a party conceivably
capable of planning the future of this country.
Sparing no expense, the RNC staged and scripted the
proceedings ad nauseam, or possibly ad tedium.
They stifled spontaneity, silenced or ignored discordant opinion, and deemed
their recent two-term president unmentionable and their last vice-presidential campaign
darling persona non grata. As if by
fiat, they ruled out embarrassments. A
locked-down convention, with no surprises.
Until, that is, the gaff-master invited one for his crowning night. Surprise!
Party luminaries came from all four corners of the nation to
talk about themselves. They made barely standard references to the party’s
standard bearer. The only one talking
primarily about Mitt Romney was his wife, Anne.
In case you missed any of the solipsism, i.e. the self as the only
reality, Santorum served Santorum, Christie boosted and boasted about Christie,
and Newt and Calista, obliviously
parodying a 20th century icon, “American Gothic,” babbled in
responsive tongues about relatively little.
The star of the evenings was not Paul Ryan, as expected, not
Mitt Romney, as longed for, and definitely not the “surprise guest,” as regretted,
but a relative unknown, Susana Martinez, the Governor of New Mexico, who scored
heavily by telling her unvarnished, and what I dearly want to believe was her
true, story.
Which bring us to truth-telling. Christie, a self-aggrandizing truth-teller,
had a lot to say about it, so he certainly wasn’t talking about Governor Romney—or,
as we now know, Representative Paul Ryan, who was supposed to be forthright and
honest, a veritable paragon of virtue or, at the least, the Gentile equivalent
of a mensch. In only 23 days since becoming
the person who could be the next vice president of the United States and only 35
minutes, give or take an untruth, of presenting that paragon to the largest
audience he’s faced to date, he has become, unabashedly and unapologetically, MisRepresentative
Ryan.
Ryan’s convention speech and subsequent lies have been
well-documented by practically everyone on both sides of the political spectrum,
so in lieu of repeating the indictments, I quote an admirable, brave
truth-teller, Sally
Kohn, a Fox News contributor and writer, “…to anyone paying the
slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to
set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and
misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.” I urge you to read her detailed account, which includes the
enlightening, “And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.”
On the whole, truth did not fare well at the GOP
convention. Nor was there as much as a
visible, honorable attempt to keep to
the facts. To the contrary, lying was
condoned and encouraged. Sound unfair
and outrageous? According to Mitt Romney’s
pollster, Neil Newhouse, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by
fact-checkers.” According to Rudy Giuliani,
in his attempt to justify Ryan’s lies, “Well, look, when people give speeches,
not every fact is absolutely accurate.” Apparently
neither Newhouse nor Giuliani, believe it or not, a former Associate Attorney
General in the United States Department of Justice, knows what “fact” means, or
that it’s an antonym of fiction.
Lying is easy and gets easier. Irresponsible politicians, inspired by “the
stupidity of people in large groups,” easily lose sight, so it seems, of honor,
principle and truth. Seduced by the sonorousness
of their own voices, they believe in the substance of their lack of substance, wallow
in slogans, catch-phrases and rhetoric and think that saying something, anything!,
makes it so. Taking Goebbels’ famous dictum
one step further: “Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” for the liar.
Now consider: If lying works so well, their fabrications may
be able to stick it to the Democrats and dupe undecided voters today, but given
the power tomorrow, what falsehoods would they be telling the country, and to
what purpose or profit?
It’s their party. And they’ll lie if they want to.
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