Not a lot to choose from [updated]

Unlike so many of the folk I follow on the net, I managed to avoid watching any of the Republican convention over the last few days. But I couldn’t avoid all their commentary. I liked this from Myrhaf at the New Clarion:

Had H.L. Mencken been revived from his grave to watch the last night of the Republican National Convention, he would have recognized the scene. He would have heard the anecdotal, folksy speeches, the paeans to family and God, and he would have understood that the booboisie [def’n: “stupid people as a class; class consisting of all those who are considered boobs”] is alive and well in America. He would have said something wittier than even Mark Steyn or James Wolcott could come up with and then asked to be killed and returned to his grave…
    Listening to speech after speech I wondered, “Is this the best the Republicans can do?”

That’s what I wondered too as I read the commentaries .

Romney should win in November. With the economy as bad as it is, in the worst recovery since the Great Depression, the election should not even be close.

That it probably will be be close demonstrates there is no confidence that Romney will be any better at bringing about recovery (or keeping out of the way of it) than either Obama or his Republican predecessor George Bush.

This is an important election, but no-one important from which to choose. The left are intellectually bankrupt.

I understand that the Obama campaign and their Democrat PAC’s have spent, according to one number I read, $120 million attacking Mitt Romney. (Obama has outspent Romney three to one so far, but that does not stop him from whining because Romney now has more money.) I understand that the American people, in our dumbed-down age, are susceptible to such an idiotic argument as Romney is mean because he ran a company that, in the course of restructuring businesses, fired people. (And that attack is the Democrats at their most intellectual. When you descend below that, you get nonsense about Romney being mean to his dog. Seriously. This is what the left has become.)

And the Republicans?

I still wonder why they had to devote so much precious airtime to “humanizing” Mitt Romney. And I laugh at right-wing pundits joyously proclaiming, “He’s human! He’s human!” Great. So glad the GOP didn’t nominate an alien from space. Can you imagine Goldwater succeeding in today’s milquetoast Republican Party?

The Republicans neither understand nor stand for capitalism—and  if they don't stand for capitalism they stand for and are nothing. Which is why they spend so much time apologising for it, and trying to “humanise” those issuing the apologies.

With the Greater Depression about to get serious (you think it’s been bad since 2007? you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!) whoever occupies the White House in the next four years will be the one making it worse in an attempt to make it better.  So this election does matter.

Except the difference between what the two will do is minimal.

When things finally do get too bad to bury any longer and all the deficits finally do hit the fan, the occupant then will act according to his lights—and not according to his election promises, which wouldn’t have included the possibility of catastrophe.

And what will each do? My guess would be that in trying to protect America’s unaffordable social-welfare programmes and his own socialist “rescue” programmes from bankruptcy, Obama will succeed only in burying America. Whereas Romney will perhaps tinker with the programmes that are burying America in deficits, but bring in the sort of protectionism that could begin burying the whole world.

From this perspective at the bottom of the South Pacific, that’s not a lot to choose from.