Romney's Really Awkward Singing

Mitt Romney's cruel, cold-blooded murder of "America the Beautiful" and his dubious offshore dealings are independent atrocities of very different sorts, but when they're juxtaposed as in the ad above, the result is just so damning. It's the funniest thing I've seen all day. Both things are disturbing, but the ad as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I wrote a few months ago, I think, about the awkwardness of Mitt Romney's singing voice, and it still hasn't lost any of its ability to make me cringe and wince and want to chew my own legs off. The vexing thing about its particular brand of awfulness is that it is, strictly speaking, not even that bad. It's just so — here comes the word of my generation — awkward.

This doesn't even really qualify as an attack ad. Something this brutal isn't mean to be as entertaining as it is. Of course there's the contrast between Romney's odiously tuneless musical ode to his country and the disservice he's done to its economy, but there's also the more subtle and possibly more effective juxtaposition of Obama's cool "here I am casually walking outside the White House and approving a message" shot, and then what follows. How gawky, how clownish, how utterly doltish it makes Willard look.

Poor Mitt. (Not really.)