Abbreviated pundit round-up: Unreal? Surreal? Romney-Ryan all set for their convention splash

^{Visual source: Newseum}

Paul Krugman describes New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who will give the GOP Convention keynote address, and presumptive vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan as "brothers under the skin":

If there is a distinctive feature to New Jersey's belt-tightening under Mr. Christie, it is its curiously selective nature. The governor was willing to cancel the desperately needed project to build another rail tunnel linking the state to Manhattan, but has invested state funds in a megamall in the Meadowlands and a casino in Atlantic City.

Also, while much of his program involves spending cuts, he has effectively raised taxes on low-income workers and homeowners by slashing tax credits. But he vetoed a temporary surcharge on millionaires while refusing to raise the state's gasoline tax, which is the third-lowest in America and far below tax rates in neighboring states. Only some people, it seems, are expected to make sacrifices.

Andrew J. Cherlin:

As we approach Election Day, the number of such myths appears to be skyrocketing. Myth-busting articles from the past month include 'Five Myths About Obama's Stimulus,' 'Five Myths About the U.S.-Iran Conflict,' 'Top Three Myths About Medicare,' 'Top Six Myths About Medicare' and, not to be outdone, 'Ten Medicare Myths.' We all love to see supposed myths debunked, but these opinion articles and blog posts are not as straightforward as they seem.

E.J. Dionne points out that George Romney walked out of the Republican Convention of 1964 because of its sharp rightward turn. This year:

Nothing better captures the absolute victory of the forces of Goldwaterism than a Romney triumph on the basis of Goldwater's ideas.

Team Romney, writes Dionne, hopes their candidate will manage to "reintroduce" himself the way Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and shake off the extremist image with which he has imprinted himself since the first primary. Good luck with that.

Mitt megaphone Jennifer Rubin, required to fill the space, phones in 10 predictions for the Republican Convention that even she admits contain less originality than her usual column. It would be almost worth seeing Romney win so he could appoint her press secretary for the two weeks she would survive in that job.

Doyle McManus says the campaign, down-ticket least, is going to be about jobs vs. Medicare.

Miami Herald Editorial Board:

Mr. Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, has offered 'tough love' with draconian cuts to vital social programs and no true sacrifice from the richest Americans as his solution to restore a balanced budget. Let's remember that President Bill Clinton, working with a Republican-led Congress, left the nation a budget surplus a dozen years ago.Yet Mr. Ryan's GOP-led House has been unwilling to budge and return to the nominal, Clinton-era tax rate on the top 2 percent of earners, which would balance the social-program cuts it wants. Doing both would produce budget reduction by means of shared sacrifice

Such obstinacy has put in peril this nation's own credit rating at a time when the global economic crisis demands pragmatic solutions not partisan entrenchment.

John Andrews:

Ryan's youthful energy at 42, the intellectual command that has propelled him into House leadership, his steely courage as a truth-teller about our fiscal peril and a pathfinder away from the precipice toward prosperity, as well as his unapologetic faith at a time when religious freedom is under attack, make the vice-presidential nominee a clear asset for Republicans and a feared opponent for Democrats.

Joel Bleifuss writes that Republicans remain eager to privatize everything they can. That includes public land:

For his part, Mitt Romney is on board, sort of. 'Unless there's a valid, and legitimate, and compelling governmental purpose, I don't know why the government owns so much of this land,' he said while campaigning in Nevada earlier this year.

That's not exactly new in the Silver State. In 1979, Nevada gave birth to the "Sagebrush Rebellion" that sought to transfer great swaths of federal land to state jurisdiction, which would have meant, in short order, private sales on a gigantic scale.

Laura Flanders says Romney's lies are as good as gold, so why stop?

As even NPR pointed out this week, the Romney campaign is dredging up the welfare debate because as a piece of political hot button'pushing, it works like magic. [...]

Barack Obama can fact-check all he likes, but it won't make this go away. Romney only looks like a stiff; his campaign's as happy in the gutter as Gingrich ever was. The GOP is betting that race-baiting will beat the Boss, and history suggests they're right. American attitudes are shifting, day by day, but majority/minority demographics aren't destiny'not yet.

Owen Jones writes that the issue isn't Barack Obama any more than it was George Bush before him. The issue is U.S. power:

It was a bad dream that went on for eight years, and no wonder much of the world is still breathing a sigh of relief. But US foreign policy these days escapes scrutiny. In part, that is down a well-grounded terror of the only viable alternative to Barack Obama: the increasingly deranged US right. A deliberate shift to a softer, more diplomatic tone has helped, too. But it is also the consequence of a strategic failure on the part of many critics of US foreign policy in the Bush era. As protesters marched in European cities with placards of Bush underneath "World's No 1 Terrorist", the anti-war crusade became personalised. Bush seemed to be the problem, and an understanding of US power ' the nature of which remains remarkably consistent from president to president ' was lost.