Convention schmonvention (3)

On Thursday Romney became the Republican party's official nominee, the legitimate nominee, as Akin might put it -- yet the American people were oddly disinclined to watch the historic occasion.  The convention's climactic night was soundly beaten in TV ratings by some godawful-looking sitcom, with audience levels down almost by half compared with the last Republican convention in 2008.  The Eastwood / chair fiasco is said to have had 1,300,000 views on YouTube so far, but I can't help thinking these are mostly the same kind of views a spectacularly messy traffic accident gets from passing drivers.  Obama apparently couldn't resist a quick tweet to rub it in (picture above).

Don't be too disappointed if the Democratic convention next week turkeys out almost as badly.  There's apparently some big-deal football game on opposite it on Wednesday, and lots of people use a four-day work week to take vacations.  Anyway, conventions are staged, choreographed, scripted events, generally free of surprises unless there's some major screw-up, and thus not of much interest to the average non-political-junkie citizen.

Anyway, some more analysis of Romney's speech:  he flagrantly lied about his party's obstructionist record, he contemptuously dismissed one of the world's biggest and most rapidly-escalating problems, and he signaled a pointlessly adversarial stance toward Russia.