Plouffe: GOP Campaign a ‘Tripod of Lies’

President Obama’s senior adviser and 2008 whiz kid David Plouffe couldn’t say whether Americans are better or worse off than they were before President Obama took office, but he sure had an opinion about the Romney campaign. On ABC’s This Week, Plouffe said the GOP campaign is “built on a tripod of lies.” He went into more detail saying there is a “welfare attack that is just absolutely untrue. The suggestion we’re raiding Medicare—absolutely untrue. And then this whole ‘we can’t build it’ nonsense,” he said. Not satisfied with just three parts of a tripod, Plouffe also took a hit at Romney’s “trickle-down fairy dust.”

Villaraigosa: ‘A Platform From Another Century’

On Fox News Sunday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa—a rumored presidential candidate in 2016—said the Republican Party’s 2012 platform “looks like the platform of 1812.” He didn’t stop there: he ripped the GOP’s policies on health care (“they want to repeal the Affordable Care Act … with no alternative plan of their own”), abortion (“they don’t believe in abortion even in the case of rape and incest”), and immigration (“self-deportation”). Yep, just like 1812—except that the Republicans aren’t advocating another war with England. Oh, and that slavery thing.

Cutter: GOP Thinks ‘Lying is a Virtue’

On Face the Nation. Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, called the convention “a week of personal attacks and empty platitudes.” Getting her talking points out in her first breath (David Plouffe used similar language on This Week, saying the GOP convention was full of “platitudes and angry insults”), Cutter went further by adding, “they really think that lying is a virtue.” Host Bob Schieffer picked up on her overreach and followed up, asking, “Are you saying they’re a bunch of liars?” At which point Cutter began to laugh nervously and immediately walk back her statement, responding, “no, Bob, I didn’t say that.” Except that she actually did.

Rahm: Romney Speech ‘Devoid and Vacuous’

Rahm really has a way with words—luckily for Republicans, he couldn’t use any four-letter ones on network TV when he described Mitt Romney’s speech as “devoid and vacuous of any ideas.” “There is nothing memorable about Mitt Romney’s speech,” Chicago Mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told Meet the Press. And that’s the only reason everybody is still talking about Clint Eastwood, he said. “Coming out of a convention, they didn’t want a debate about Clint Eastwood, they wanted it about Mitt Romney’s ideas. We’re not having that debate.”

Axelrod: Economy ‘in a Better Position’

President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod told Chris Matthews on Fox News Sunday that “we’re in a better position than we were four years ago in our economy,” countering the Republicans’ oft-repeated remark at the convention that “this president cannot tell us that you’re better of today than when he took office.” Then Axelrod quickly shifted his focus to take aim at the Republican nominee, saying the GOP convention was nothing more than an attempt to revitalize Romney’s image as a “reinvention convention.” He got the final jab in by saying the party’s “platform is locked up in the same vault as Mitt Romney’s tax returns.”

Forced Word Play with Martin O’Malley

On CNN’s State of the Union, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley proved that Paul Ryan isn’t the only one who can use forced parallelism. “We are the party that is for Social Security and for Medicare,” he said. “They are the party whose choices would lead to insecurity for seniors and their policy is ‘I don’t care, go get a voucher, you figure it out.’” With only a few days before he’s slated to speak at the Democratic convention, let’s hope O’Malley tightens up that rhetoric.

Bellantoni: Youth Don’t Know Clint

Despite not being a part of the so-called “younger generation," PBS NewsHour’s politics editor Christina Bellantoni spoke on behalf of those who are during Reliable Sources to opine about Clint Eastwood’s convention speech. “Even if he had given a really effective speech,” she said, “there are a lot of people in the younger generation that just don’t know who Clint Eastwood is.” Eastwood, therefore, “might not have been the right messenger” to connect with "the youth," she said. But Generation Y surely watched The Daily Show’s coverage of the convention, right?