Well, Were Their Lips Moving?

August 29: Driftglass said it, and added the perfect graphics: why there's no surprise in seeing "a Republican candidate for Vice President who gets up on the biggest stage of his life and -- in front of tens of millions of his fellow citizens -- lies as easily and unself-consciously as a dog licking its ass"—

This is all they are now. And the reason it might very well work this time even though we can see it coming right down Michigan Avenue is that the Republican system of bald-faced, pathological lying requires only two moving parts: first, a Party that, top to bottom, has gone fully sociopathic and will lie about anything, any time without batting an eye, and second, a complicit, enabling Centrist media which categorically refuse to call them on their lying.

Charles Pierce weighed in on "The Backlash to the Backlash to the Paul Ryan Speech"—

I suspect that, within a week, the consensus among the elite political media will once again settle on Who Really Knows All The Facts Anyway, and that Paul Ryan's reputation as a genial policy wonk will be re-established, and the search for "common ground" on which we can all agree to starve granny will resume apace.

August 30: The Base knows no cognitive dissonance, which would imply a capacity for cognition. Therefore, those bootstrapping "Nyah!Nyah!We did it ourselves!" convention speakers like Chris Christie. As whetstone put it in alicublog comments—

It was a wonderful night for big gummit programs: the GI bill, public transportation, Rutgers, and Ann Romney namedropping her hubby's state scholarship program (merit-based dough for 18,200 moochers this year), which isn't just free money, it's only for kids who go to public universities.

Then—as Reagan stand-in?—an incoherent elderly actor took the stage.

Driftglass' take—

Upon reflection, I must admit that Mr. Eastwood summed up the GOP base flawlessly: a cranky old white man yelling at an imaginary President about fictional problems.

Pierce says what Romney's handlers "were shooting for on Thursday night was an extended exercise in Pinocchio, You're a Real Boy Now," and that—

... On Thursday night, Willard Romney may have come as close to humanity as he needs to come. The rest is all just waiting for him out there — 8-percent unemployment, and a Democratic Party that may well spend a week talking about how much they're willing to cut and how serious they are about The Deficit. I felt a pulse on Thursday night, and I saw a certain vigorous color come to his cheeks. I think Romney's alive now, and it bothers me, because I think he's a lot closer to becoming president than he was at the beginning of the night.

Matt Taibbi points to the "hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney": his running against "debt" when—

Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time.
In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps.

With so corrupt a political system and a media that looks the other way, we face an election that should in no way be so close, yet is.

One voice that spoke out about that corruption is terribly missed. Matt Sullivan quoted this on her birthday—

"Either we figure out how to keep corporate cash out of the political system, or we lose the democracy."
—Molly Ivins, August 30, 1944 - January 31, 2007

Barry Friedman adds—

... her greatest line: "I'd rather someone burn the flag and wrap himself in the constitution than burn the constitution and wrap himself in the flag."