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" Now this, this right here is the kind of thing that must make Al Gore want to dive to the bottom of a vat of Jack Daniels and drink his way to the surface again. For two years, his attempt to become president of the United States was bedeviled by journalistic malpractice based on things he hadn&amp;#039;t said, things he hadn&amp;#039;t claimed to do, and all around the general theme that he was a fake and a phony and a fraud. How lasting was the damage? How many idiots did you hear in the last ten days referring to how Gore &amp;quot;sighed&amp;quot; during that debate with C-Plus Augustus, despite the fact that, as Bob Somerby tirelessly points out, this alleged &amp;quot;sighing&amp;quot; didn&amp;#039;t matter at all at the time, but only became important when it was fitted over the following two weeks into the narrative that already existed. Now, though, Gore has to watch a Republican ticket bring fakery, phoniness and fraudulence to an almost epic level, and get away largely clean. The head of a northeast Ohio charity says that the Romney campaign last week &amp;quot;ramrodded their way&amp;quot; into the group&amp;#039;s Youngstown soup kitchen so that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan could get his picture taken washing dishes in the dining hall. Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, said that he was not contacted by the Romney campaign ahead of the Saturday morning visit by Ryan, who stopped by the soup kitchen after a town hall at Youngstown State University. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re a faith-based organization; we are apolitical because the majority of our funding is from private donations,&amp;quot; Antal said in a phone interview Monday afternoon. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there, and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors.&amp;quot; He added: &amp;quot;The photo-op they did wasn&amp;#039;t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.&amp;quot; I warned right at the start of this campaign that, to the Romneys, there are only two kinds of people in the world: themselves, and The Help. It is their job to live their god-kissed lives and it is the job of The Help to make those god-kissed lives as trouble-free as possible. We are scenery, set decoration. We are props in the long-running production of The Importance of Being Willard. It was the job, ordained from on High, for the people at that soup kitchen to be available for use by Romney&amp;#039;s running mate. It didn&amp;#039;t matter that there was nothing for them to do there. They exist only to serve the higher good of helping Willard Romney attain what he wants when he wants it. This, to me, should be something of a dealbreaker. It is a clear window not only into the sheer contempt the ticket has for people less fortunate than its two principal players \u2014 which, of course, is almost everyone \u2014 but also the sheer contempt it has for the intelligence of the voters to which it is ostensibly appealing. This should be something of a dealbreaker. At the very least, it should drain all the credibility from any further attempts to turn the Romneybot 2.0 into recognizably human form. Hell, the ridicule alone should go on for two or three days. In fact, the Romney-Ryan headquarters already should have been deluged with rubber gloves, SOS pads, and bottles of Palmolive dishwashing liquid. The zombie-eyed granny-starver has spent two weeks looking completely ridiculous, on and off the debate stage. (Learn how to wear a ballcap, foof.) He already should be Dan Quayle with spreadsheets. (Want to see why it won&amp;#039;t work out that way? Check out that Update about how the director of the soup kitchen has voted in 17 Democratic primaries. Which means what, precisely? That the dishes Paul Ryan pretended to wash actually were dirty? If the Post didn&amp;#039;t get those numbers straight from the Romney oppo shop, I&amp;#039;ll eat Sally Quinn&amp;#039;s tinfoil hat.) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16306/paul-ryan-soup-kitchen-photo-13780169/?src=rss>