Charles Pierce in Esquire puts it so well that my elaboration is unnecessary:
Leave it to Willard Romney, international man of principle, to get himself bullied into being bold and independent.
Make no mistake. In his decision to make Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, his running mate, Romney finally surrendered the tattered remnants of his soul not only to the extreme base of his party, but also to extremist economic policies, and to an extremist view of the country he seeks to lead. This is unimaginable to those of us who lived here under Romney’s barely perceptible stewardship of the Commonwealth (God save it!). If he’d even hinted that he agreed with a fraction of a smidgen of a portion of the policies on which Ryan has built his career, Romney would have been hanging from the Sacred Cod by the middle of 2005. And it’s hard not to notice that the way the decision got leaked — in the dead of a Friday night, with the Olympics still going on, after two weeks in which Romney and his campaign had demonstrated all the political skills of a handball — fairly dripped with flopsweat….
The two wings of the GOP are united at last!
Courage.
UPDATE 12 Aug: Upon sober reflection, I realize that my earlier cartoon was perhaps not a model of moderation and civility. Consequently, I offer this much more palatable cartoon as a substitute to any offended by “Mitt and the Munster.”
I enjoyed the first cartoon the best!
Yeah I liked the first one, and really, though I am not offended by anything on any of your pages, those who might be would probably find that picture one of the milder offerings here! Thanks for the chuckles – even the new cartoon gave me a laugh, being in that old 50s vein that R&R would be so comfortable going back to!
Those two cartoons are great, they could also be the last chuckles we get for a long time if the R&R ticket wins. On a positive note, however, yesterday I read where someone tallied up the national polls and found that Obama was leading at an average of 7 points, and electoral votes by around 100, so keep after the disgruntled democrats who say they are staying home. If we can unite the way the republicans do, we can stay in power for many years, which will give US the opportunity to fix things in a sensible way, instead of the harsh measures the GOP has in store for us.
This also sets the fall schedule for 2016, does it not? For, by hoisting Ryan out of the ooze of the far Right and onto the ticket, Willard makes him officially mainstream (he was provisionally so already), invests him with electoral plausibility (though no congressman has become VP since Cactus Jack Garner in 1932), and provides him the opportunity to appear endlessly for four years on cable news gabfests en route to a certain presidential nomination.
He’s only 42. We’ll not be shed of his mindset for decades.
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