Politics sucks right now

There is a lot of chatter on the internet right now about Paul Ryans speech at the convention last night.

I personally did not see it, but I did read the text - I find that when listening to wonderful speakers like Obama, or Ryan, or even Palin, reading the test gives a much better sense of what they are actually saying because they are able to inspire such strong feelings with their oratory - and the text was depressing. Ryan didn't talk about policy, not his health-care policy, his theory about the size of government, his staunchly right wing social positions which are incredibly popular with the Republican base. Instead he told a very good story about his background, and then lied, a lot, about Obama's record. 

It was colossally depressing. 

I am admittedly lefty, and although I have taken reading Red State as much as the Maddow Blog, I still tend lean left in my interpretations of the news. 

- As a side note, about 2/3 of the time when I read Red State I think that the bloggers there are nuts, but about 1/3 of the time I think, is that true? That is a lot more often than I thought it would happen ... I then look up the fact and it is true, and then I get really pissed at the left for obscuring or lying about some fact so often that I believed their spin. Its not that I don't think idealogues lie and spin to support their positions, its just that I don't want "my side" to do something so distasteful. It feels like I have been duped. And I wish there was somewhere to run to so that I could avoid being duped again, but alas, all politics is like this these days, so I end up still leaning left, supporting people who lie in support of more positions I like ... very much a lesser of two evils scenario - 

Anyway, I have seen a lot of  thoughts about the speech last night - most of the media, barring the explicit right blogs like Red State and Drudge think that Ryan spoke well, fired up the base but was full of shit, etc … it is just the extent to which they report on him being full of this that varies. 

Ezra Klein captured my thoughts well here 

"Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation. Even if you bend over backward to be generous to them — as the Tax Policy Center did when they granted the Romney campaign a slew of essentially impossible premises in order to evaluate their tax plan — you often find yourself forced into the same conclusion: This doesn’t add up, this doesn’t have enough details to be evaluated, or this isn’t true."

On the "Redstate, they have whole articles about how the left is going crazy because Ryan is telling the truth :) 

Its like we will in two different countries. 

In talking to a friend of mine, he stated that he now thinks Romney will lose, because his campaign is basically slinging bullshit and not backing it up with anything ... I agree with that but he is currently gaining in a number of polls and I often feel like most of the US does not pay enough attention to realize how inaccurate he is, how little he actually says and how dumb he must think people are to buy all the shit he is pedaling. 

The worst part it, the Obama campaign is also full of shit, although most of their falsehoods are by implication or spin, rather than outright falsehoods like Romneys claims about Obamas welfare policy. The major difference is that Obama has already been president for 4 years, and so you kind of know what you are going to get, while Romney has disavowed and reavowed, papered over and exalted almost every part of his past, making it basically impossible to believe anything he says. 

The state of our politics is super depressing right now, because Obama and his machine are often only half (or less) honest, spiteful and focused on minutia that do not do anything to solve our problems … and Romney is like a twisted, awful caricature of Obama, who is already bad … Ultimately I think that Obama will win, not because he does or does not deserve it (we would have to get into a coversation about the state of government and what politicians truly want for our country), but because I don't think America will support such a dishonest, substanceless campaign as Romneys. But this election cycle, and the type of politics both campaigns think are necessary to win the White House, has really soured me on politics and the state of our country in general, leaving me little hope that it will get fixed anytime soon.