First Door on the Left

For my first post on this fine September morn, I am going to borrow blatantly from two sites that I visit religiously every day… Talking Points Memo and BobGeiger.com.

First, via Talking Points Memo…

Did you happen to watch John McCain’s little talk last night? Did you wonder why, with all the talk of all the houses he owns (so many he does not even know the number), they would be showing a picture of a large mansion on the screen behind him?

Well… Turns out that somebody was tasked with finding a picture of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Instead, what they found (and ultimately showed behind Sen. McCain) was a picture of the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California. Our Republicans really are a laugh a minute, aren’t they? (One cannot help but wonder how it is that they do not know what Walter Reed Army Medical Center looks like. Perhaps it has something to do with what Bob Geiger noticed…)

Finally, Bob Geiger points out that fact that not once, not once, during their entire snooze fest did the Republicans mention our troops. You know, our men and women and boys and girls who are fighting and dying in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world? For all the “Support Our Troops” magnets they have stuck to the back of their Mercedes and BMWs, they could not find it in themselves to mention those troops or pay homage to them one time during their convention. (I guess they were too busy reminding us that Johnny McCain was a prisoner of war some 40 year ago.)

Republicans talked a lot this week about highlighting the “stark contrasts” between their candidate and Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama — and here is that contrast: When Obama spoke last week in Denver, he talked movingly about being “… more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets” and spoke about how “in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton’s Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.”

He also talked, as he has many times in his U.S. Senate tenure, about how he will “give better care for our veterans” and said that, in addition to so many children to protect, we have “so many veterans to care for.”

And what did the major speakers at the Republican convention, including McCain and Palin — the “country first” crowd — have to say on the subject?

Nada, nothing.

As I was watching, I had the feeling that something was missing. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Thanks, Bob, for pointing it out.

Finally, and just for future reference my Republican friends, this is what Walter Reed Army Medical Center looks like (Google is your friend):

The Friday Night Cartoons will be along in a while.

Update: The Walter Reed Middle School was the school that Matt Santos stood in front of when he announced his candidacy for presidency on The West Wing. Watch.

Perhaps this was not a mistake by our Republican friends, after all. Perhaps it was intentional. It just gets stranger and stranger. Who, after all, is capable of looking into the mind of a Republican?

Tags: 2008, John McCain, presidential campaign, Republican National Convention, Republicans