By Tribune-Review

Published: Wednesday, October 3, 2012, 10:55 p.m.
Updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The sophist in chief was in customary conniving form during the first of three presidential debates Wednesday night in Denver. But Republican nominee Mitt Romney mortally wounded every shibboleth that Barack Obama could throw at him.

Economic issues were at the forefront. And so thorough was the intellectual beating the former Massachusetts governor delivered to the Democrat incumbent that 20 minutes into the first segment, the president cried “Uncle!”

“Jim,” the president said to moderator Jim Lehrer, “you may want to move on to another topic.”

But it only got worse for Obama. And on every topic broached, Romney refused to allow Obama's boilerplate liberal rhetoric to get in the way of the facts.

The president repeatedly misrepresented the facts regarding the auto industry, education, entitlements, taxes, financial regulation and ObamaCare. He even coined a troubling new euphemism for top-down government — “economic patriotism.”

Seventeenth-century scholar John Selden once wrote that “Reason without logic is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root.”

Mitt Romney not only exposed Barack Obama's presidency and policies as being rootless in Wednesday's debate, he exposed his leaves and blossoms to be plastic — and cheap plastic at that.

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