The GOP Throws a Masquerade Ball

This blog has noted many times the dishonesty that now pervades the Republican Party.  Along with the dishonest goes an arrogance that views average Americans as such utter cretins that we can't figure out that we are being lied to and that we will fall for the pretense that the GOP as a party gives a rat ass about most of us.  Truth be told, the party cares about you only if you are white, conservative Christian, heterosexual, and preferably very wealthy.  Maureen Dowd has a great column in the New York Times that looks at the incredibly disingenuous GOP that ended this week.  Once again, she excels at exposing hypocrisy.  Here are excerpts:

MESSAGE: They care. Republicans care deeply. They really do. They care deeply about making us think that they care deeply.  That’s why they knocked themselves out producing a convention that was a colossal hoax. 

We all know Republicans prefer riches-to-riches sagas and rounding up immigrants, if the parasitic scofflaws aren’t sensitive enough to self-deport.  That’s why my heart swells to think of the herculean effort the G.O.P. put into pretending its heart bleeds.

And despite the soft quiver in his voice, and Ann’s nonstop transfusions of emotion and wrenching testimonials from Mormons forced to publicly relive family tragedies simply to give Mitt a personality, the terribly erect candidate still seemed as remote as Jupiter.  

It was truly thrilling to watch the blindingly white older male delegates greet their young, blue-eyed future: Paul Ryan, the 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman who turns out to be more talented than anyone had anticipated — a prodigy of prestidigitation. 

In his speech Wednesday night, the altar boy altered reality, conjuring up a world so compassionate, so full of love-thy-neighbor kindness and small-town goodness, that you had to pinch yourself to remember it was a shimmering mirage, a beckoning pool of big, juicy lies. (The fitness freak may have also fibbed about running a sub-three-hour marathon in 1991; Runner’s World reports that his time was 4 hours and 1 minute.)

The convention was an unparalleled triumph of mythmaking, or Mittmaking. Romney was so eager to woo Hispanic votes and join the cascade of speakers sharing immigrant family tales, from Rick Santorum to Ann Romney to Marco Rubio, that he made his father, George Romney, sound Hispanic. 

It was fitting that David Koch was the beaming financial god presiding over this Orwellian makeover of Republicans as generous communitarians who care about grandmas, cherish immigrants and defend Medicare, so movingly described by the vice presidential nominee who tried to turn Medicare into a voucher system as “an obligation we have to our parents and grandparents.” Koch leads the Orwellian movement of oil billionaires playing grass-roots activists. 

The stage show looked like America, but the convention hall did not. The crowd seemed like the sanctuary of a minority — economically wounded capitalists in shades from eggshell to ecru, cheering the man from Bain and trying to fathom why they’re not running the country anymore. The speakers ranted about an America in decline, but the audience reflected a party in decline. 

It’s a strange moment when Americans relate less to the tall, handsome, rich prince of a famous political family than to a skinny black dude of mixed parentage who spent a lot of time in Indonesia.  

Ryan’s harsh stances toward women, the old and the poor are on record, so he set a new standard for gall when he intoned, “The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” 

Ryan’s lies and Romney’s shape- shifting are so easy to refute that they must have decided a Hail Mary pass of artifice was better than their authentic ruthless worldview.