Stanley’s Convention Steamer

This week, the US Convention show moves to Charlotte, NC, where the Democrats are enjoying a rather more ordered and happy time than the Republicans’ effort last week in Tampa, FL. Barack Obama has been nominated unopposed as the Party’s candidate for President (not always the case with a sitting President, as Jimmy Carter found out in 1980) and there have been no howlers as yet.

That’s in contrast to the ruckus around the abortion issue that dogged the GOP, followed by Mitt Romney’s big night being overshadowed by Clint Eastwood’s bizarre interrogation of “Invisible Obama”. In fact, things have gone better for the Dems than hoped, with Michelle Obama’s speech in support of her husband widely praised, and Bill Clinton’s effort not hurting the Prez one little bit.

So what do the right-wing pundits tell their readers? Do they give them the bad news, that Romney and Paul Ryan look set to go down to a heavy defeat in November? Do they heck. So they do not. Typical is our old friend Tim Stanley at the Telegraph, who you can tell as he’s a doctor, who first almost praised Clinton, but only until he’d endorsed Obama, after which it was all withering criticism.

Bill was first portrayed as a moderate, who had wrested the Democratic Party from what Stanley suggests is some kind of 1980s leftism. He has clearly not heard of Franklin Roosevelt, or Lyndon Johnson. There hasn’t been a Democrat challenger as liberal as LBJ since he memorably told the world “I will not seek, nor shall I accept” back in 1968 as Gene McCarthy stood on an anti-Vietnam war platform.

And Obama certainly isn’t as liberal as LBJ. But he’s painted that way anyway by the right, not of course that it’s an alternative way of saying he’s black, oh no. Perish the thought. So Stanley ploughs on and tells readers that the Dems are as extreme as the GOP. Then he sprays his credibility up the wall by citing the late Andrew Breitbart in his defence.

The accusation against the GOP – that Ronald Reagan couldn’t win the nomination from today’s party – is then spun to suggest that Clinton couldn’t win the Dems’ nomination either. But then Bill rocks up and spends over 40 minutes telling the audience that Barack is The Man, thus showing that argument to be specious. But then Stanley brings up God. The Dems have got rid of God.

So that means they’re all lefties, and Janet Daley piles in to support her colleague, telling how central God is to the Constitution. Yes Janet, like paper money is banned by that same Constitution, and the workaround means you have to believe the Federal Reserve is not part of the Federal Government. I’d recommend reading both posts as examples of right-wing punditry trying desperately to redefine reality.

Romney is going to lose. It might be a bad defeat. You might as well get over it.