But before we hear from UD, let’s hear from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.
SOS notes that Romney found a fine speechwriter. Here’s some of the good stuff.
[Trump is a] twisted example of evil trumping good.
Nice use of the last name. “Twisted” is a strong word, and gives the sentence a gently tripping alliteration. Twisted also helps make one of Romney’s larger points: Trump is nuts.
There is a dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War while at the same time John McCain, who he has mocked, was imprisoned and tortured.
Dark irony is pretty effing sophisticated for a political speech, in SOS‘s humble opinion. SOS expects to find dark irony in essays about Franz Kafka. Color SOS also pretty astonished that Romney’s willing to say Trump humped his way through the war. This is a point best made by Bill Maher (now that Robin Williams is no longer with us), but even without going for the easy laugh, Romney does more than respectably with it.
His imagination must not be married to real power.
The he’s nuts point again, made pithily and well. SOS thinks that Romney’s decision to stress Trump’s disordered grandiose mind was a wise one. If the point is to needle Trump in order to get him to act even more insanely than he’s been acting, nothing will work better than heading for the complex private terrain of his mind. It’s like that cruel game in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf when George finally has Martha madly shrieking that she’s NOT nuts, she’s NOT nuts! “You’re all flops,” screams Martha (losers, in Trumpspeech), and I’m the only sane one around here…
A later phrase along these lines – Trump’s “absurd third-grade theatrics” – adds infantile to grandiose and disordered. And look at the poetry of the phrase: absurd rhymes with third; grade is a nearish-rhyme with third, and theatrics wakes the phrase up by putting a long-voweled, tri-syllabic word at the end.
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Ok, and as for UD‘s response: She has two points to make.
1. As a university maven, UD was pleased to see Trump University rear its head.
His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.
2. For UD, who will vote for Hillary, the speech is also a winner because Romney’s intemperate remarks about Hillary will, UD thinks, inspire more people to vote for her:
Even as Romney condemned Trump as a fundamental threat to the nation, he gave credence to Republicans’ wide-ranging hysteria about Hillary Clinton. “A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president,” he declared, reflecting a variety of negative GOP tendencies — accepting distortions as plain truth, making it seem as though the fate of the Republic constantly hangs on Republicans winning the next election, arguing that their opponents are not just wrong but illegitimate.
March 4th, 2016 at 8:26AM
I’d say “dark irony” would be more sophisticated if I thought that what he was really referring to actually qualifies as irony. I’m not certain that it does. How is it that two people doing two different things at the same time is ironic? I guess Alanis Morissette ruined it for all of us, but I don’t think it’s ironic. Telling, perhaps? Reflective of character perhaps? A useful reminder? I’m not certain it’s ironic, darkly or otherwise.
March 4th, 2016 at 8:50AM
Derek: I completely agree. I didn’t get around to say what you’ve said – what Romney’s describing isn’t an irony, dark or light – but it went through my mind to make this point. Thanks.
March 4th, 2016 at 11:49AM
Well, to be fair, the current Republican race gives you a whole lot of material to work with. If we’re not selective we’d do nothing BUT parse this stuff.