295.9 -or- The 2008 Republican National Convention

My Mother asked me yesterday what I thought of the Republican convention, an the only word I could think of was schizophrenic. Contradictions abounded throughout the past week, not just between speakers but also within any given speech. Here are just a few that I observed:

• The campaign of the politician who has received more favorable media treatment than anyone over the past decade attacked the media
  
• A Harvard educated multi-millionare from Boston complains about "eastern elites"
  
• Romney, who once ran a private equity firm that eliminated thousands of jobs in the name of higher profits blames Liberals for employment problems
  
• The ex-mayor of New York complains that Obama is too urban
  
• The GOP candidates told us that change and reform were necessary and that McCain was the man to bring that change by continuing the policies of the last eight years
  
• McCain was celebrated for being a "Maverick" because he bucked his party on a few issues such as immigration reform, positions he has subsequently rejected and repudiated
• Several speakers complained about both extending Constitutional protections and not honoring the Constitution
  
• Campaign representatives and surrogates complained that Obama offered only empty promises with no specifics, then presented four days with no specifics for McCain's plans
  
• GOP leaders claimed that Obama only glorified himself at the Democratic convention* and derided Obama as "The One," then spent four days aggrandizing John McCain culminating with John McCain taking more than half of his speech to talk about John McCain (apparently in the belief that there was someone somewhere unaware that McCain was once a POW).
  
• Tuesday's theme was "community service"; Wednesday saw Guliani and Palin mocking community organizers; on Thursday McCain then asked Americans to volunteer in their communities
  
• Romney told us that opportunities grow when Constitutional freedoms are preserved then complained because we are not allowed to torture Gitmo detainees 
• Speakers behaved as if Republicans were the insurgents, not the incumbants, never once mentioning that it was a Republican President and a GOP controlled congress that got us into this mess.

*In point of fact, about 15% of Obama's speech contained references to himself.