A matched set: one from the gutter, one explaining the gutter

Joe Biden sent me an email the other day, one that was remarkable for the complete absence of substance, and the overwhelming presence of 1930s, Daddy Warbuck-ish invective:

Starting now, we can expect even more wealthy, right-wing ideologues lining up to support the Romney-Ryan ticket.

The people on the other side who are trying to buy this election are putting nasty, deceptive TV ads on the air right this very minute. They’re not going away. They’re getting worse.

If we don’t do what we can to keep this close, right now at this crucial moment, we risk letting the other side run away with it.

If you’re thinking about making a donation to the campaign, please don’t wait — donate $5 or more today, and let’s win this together.

Every single day from now until Election Day matters. At the end of it, we’ll all ask ourselves if we did everything we could to make sure that we are able to keep fighting for change.

I know how I want to answer that question. I hope you’re with me — because we’re up against the kind of outside spending never seen before in modern politics.

And without people like you, this could get to be a pretty lopsided fight.

November 6th will be here sooner than we think. Donate $5 or more today:

Somehow I missed the part where Biden explained what he and Obama have to offer the voters, other than more of the same failed policies.

And then I read George Will’s theory about the true reason Romney picked Ryan, above and beyond Ryan’s obvious qualifications.  Incidentally, this is the most heated I’ve ever seen George Will, and I’ve been hearing and reading his editorials since the 1970s (emphasis mine):

Romney embraced Ryan after the sociopathic — indifferent to the truth — ad for Barack Obama that is meretricious about every important particular of the death from cancer of the wife of steelworker Joe Soptic. Obama’s desperate flailing about to justify four more years has sunk into such unhinged smarminess that Romney may have concluded: There is nothing Obama won’t say about me, because he has nothing to say for himself, so I will chose a running mate whose seriousness about large problems and ideas underscores what the president has become — silly and small.

He on whose behalf the Soptic ad was made used to dispense bromides deploring “the smallness of our politics” and “our preference for scoring cheap political points.” Obama’s campaign of avoidance — say anything to avoid the subject of the country’s condition — must now reckon with Ryan’s mastery of Obama’s enormous addition to decades of governmental malpractice.

Will the general American public — not the blood thirsty ideologues, but the ordinary, vaguely interested people — care that they are the subject of a sociopathic demagogue’s emotional manipulation? I hope that Romney’s and Ryan’s innate sunny-ness, and the manifest respect they have for the intelligence of the American people, will triumph over some of the most filthy lies an American political party has ever produced. It’s time for the American people to stop letting Democrats fool them some of the time or all of the time.