"Colossal Hoax"

That's what Maureen Dowd calls the GOP convention in her Sunday column, just posted.  She has been particularly rough on the Repubs in recent days, though she will (if history is a guide) prove nearly as caustic about the Dem confab coming up. Nice scoopy quote from former GOP congressman, and moderate,  Chris Shays: “Our biggest crime was trying to impeach the one president who was working with us.”

It was truly thrilling to watch the blindingly white older male delegates greet their young, blue-eyed future: Paul Ryan, the 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman who turns out to be more talented than anyone had anticipated — a prodigy of prestidigitation.

In his speech Wednesday night, the altar boy altered reality, conjuring up a world so compassionate, so full of love-thy-neighbor kindness and small-town goodness, that you had to pinch yourself to remember it was a shimmering mirage, a beckoning pool of big, juicy lies. (The fitness freak may have also fibbed about running a sub-three-hour marathon in 1991; Runner’s World reports that his time was 4 hours and 1 minute.)

As the writer Dermot McEvoy notes, Ryan has “the so sincere, so phony air of a gloomy Irish undertaker standing outside the funeral parlor where you’ve come to plant your mother, shaking his head consolingly and giving you that firm two-handed Irish handshake.” Except with Ryan, it’s the safety net in the coffin.