Humor: The Borowitz Report

Less Interesting Person Than Romney Found in Wisconsin

Posted by Andy Borowitz

U.S.S. WISCONSIN (The Borowitz Report)—An exhaustive manhunt that took months and spanned the country came to a dramatic end today as a less interesting person than Mitt Romney turned up in Wisconsin.

On the deck of the U.S.S. Wisconsin, officials from the Guinness Book of World Records were on hand to certify the result of the search.

“This man is in fact the least interesting person in America,” one Guinness official said, adding that Mr. Romney himself had held that title since 1947.

Mr. Romney and the man made a joint appearance, after which the audience was advised not to operate heavy machinery.

The man of the hour used his brief remarks to lay out his vision of America, saying that billions of dollars could be saved by eliminating food, clothing, and shelter.

For his part, Mr. Romney sounded a theme for the fall campaign: “It’s time to transform America, and the two of us are both Transformers.”

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Mario Piperni on Eddie Munster Ryan

Romney and Ryan As The New Munsters

August 11, 2012 By mario piperni

When one of our readers (E.A.) suggested the idea of Paul Ryan as Eddie Munster, I immediately recognized it as a natural. With Ryan’s ridiculously low hairline, widows peak and brushy eyebrows, it didn’t take much work to transform Ryan into little Eddie. As for the Mitt/Herman transformation, a quick peek into Romney’s cold inner being was all the inspiration I needed.

Actually, anyone who remembers the ’60s series, The Munsters, knows that Herman was a decent, soft-spoken guy disconnected from reality. The Munster family (Herman, Lily, Grandpa and Eddie) were a ghoulish family composed of a Frankenstein dad, a vampire as his wife, her vampire father, Eddie the werewolf son and Marilyn, their normal looking niece, who was considered the ugly duckling of the family.

The show centered around the Munsters failed attempts to assimilate into normal society. Their tendency to view normal everyday folk as misfits was their downfall. Remind you of anyone you know?

If Mitt and Ann Romney have shown us anything, it’s that their privileged life of mansions, car elevators, dressage horses and Cayman Islands tax havens has left them unable to understand the struggles that middle class Americans face each and every day. Only a man completely out of touch with regular folk would find it amusing to mock people in $3 plastic raincoats (“I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks”) while boasting of his friendship with race car owners.

When Ann Romney said, “We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life”, she wasn’t kidding. The Romneys view themselves as a part of society far removed from the riff-raff that clean their pools and sweep up Rafalca‘s droppings.

Herman never figured out why it was he who was the misfit and not the other way around. Don’t hold your breath hoping Mitt is ever going to figure it out either.

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(The Romney and Ryan source photographs are Creative Commons licensed images from photographer Gage Skidmore.)

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Andrew Sullivan on the Ryan Rating

Paul Ryan: Not A Moderate

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver compares Ryan to past veeps:

Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann, the controversial congresswoman of Minnesota.

By this measure, in fact, which rates members of the House and Senate throughout different time periods on a common ideology scale, Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that is is the furthest from the center. (The statistic does not provide scores for governors and other vice presidential nominees who never served in Congress.)

Mario Piperni on Paul Ryan

Romney Picks Ryan and The RomneYAN Candidacy Begins

August 11, 2012 By mario piperni

I don’t think anyone has coined RomneYAN so I’m claiming ownership to it and you’re all witness to it.

As for Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, it’s a risky move for Romney but both political parties will love it. Republicans believe Ryan will be able to move the focus of the election away from Romney’s tax returns, tax havens and his Bain years and bring it back onto the only issue they want to discuss – blaming the weak economy on President Obama.

As for Democrats, Ryan in the VP slot allows them to zero in on the Ryan budget and the catastrophic effect it will have on the middle class, the social safety net and economic recovery. Up to this point, Romney has been reluctant to talk about the Ryan budget but those days are over. It’s now front and center.

Timothy Noah at the New Republic believes Romney has just handed the election over to Obama.

…that’s the final demonstration that Romney will never, ever move to the center. He will never stop trying to establish his bona fides with the Republican party’s hard right wing, even when doing so demonstrably harms his own interest, as it does here. The inmates will run the asylum.

…this is a fantastic stroke of luck for President Obama. Presidents presiding over the sort of economy we have right now don’t usually get re-elected. But a president handed the opportunity to run against a GOP ticket that’s unabashedly in favor of abolishing Medicare–something even the Tea Party opposes–would probably win in November.

Erick ‘Son of Erick‘ Erickson believes that the Ryan pick while not the safest one Romney could have made, is the right one for a candidate desperately needing to shift the momentum over to his side.

Paul Ryan exposes the left’s great lie. They think they can just raise taxes on those who make $250,000.00 a year or more and never have to cut spending or fix entitlements. Paul Ryan not only exposes that lie, but he has plans to solve it. He does so as a fresh, young face who is not at all scary to old people and relates to them and to young people. He himself is in his early 40s with small kids. He’s from a swing state, out performed John McCain in his home district, and is telegenic and articulate. Paul Ryan is what Mitt Romney needs.

We’ll see but with three months to go, the one sure bet is that a Paul Ryan in the VP slot serves Republicans better than a Sarah Palin ever could.

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(The Romney source photograph is a Creative Commons licensed image from photographer Gage Skidmore. The Paul Ryan source photograph is in the public domain.)

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