Zell Miller

Kate regular, Jesse italics, Ezra bold.

Zell just revealed that he loves his family. Now, I see why he couldn't be in the Democratic Party.

We're telling a Wendell Wilkie story. And it somehow relates to the "Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in-Chief". The real question, however, is what Thomas Dewey would say about the election.

You know what I'm sayin?

It's nice to see someone who isn't pretending to be moderate, but I can't help noticing that after every point Mitt Romney makes, he gives a look that's a cross between a hurt puppy and utmost truth bearer.

Mitt Romney

Well, that sure didn't live up to the hype. And the Lt. Governor of Massachusetts is a terrible speaker as well; she reached the vaunted Bush twins level of stilted.

Good for Small Businesses?

Hi all. My name is Kate, I have the pleasure of hanging out in NY this week with Ezra and Jesse, along with the pain of watching the convention. Let's just say they got a bit tired of my incessant yelling at the television and suggested I hop on to Pandagon for some convention coverage.

If you're presently watching the convention, you might think that Bush is the best thing since sliced bread for small businesses. Why? Because of his must- be-from-the-mouth-of-God-himself-they're-so-perfect-tax-cuts! Unfortunately for small business owners, this is not true. According to the DNC

Dickhead

Just sayin'.

Oh, Those Jews

Liberal leftist Jews have complained about the happenstance construction of a t-shaped symbol on the GOP platform which isn't really cross-like at all, although it is aesthetically ugly.

The little stand of Passion DVDs on sale in the little kiosk next to the podium, however, is a little bit harder to explain away. The limited edition ones with Mel Gibson's real blood on them are available through the GOP's official convention site.

Operation Bend Over Scrapped. Operation Scorched Earth Engaged.

Nice:

Zell Gets Smacked

Zell says:

The Good Lie Young

You know, if someone wanted, I think there's good money to be made in producing a series of dental hygeine videos called "Swift Boat Veterans Against Tooth", about a bunch of disgruntled baby teeth who used to serve alongside a molar and then try to destroy it by sending wave after wave of plaque and tartar and decay after it. I don't quite have the plot worked out yet, but I think it's got potential.

Anyway, there's a new Swift Boat lie, which I'm sure you were breathlessly waiting with anticipation to hear.

There are over 260 veterans arrayed against Kerry, all of whom signed affadavits and a letter testifying to what they believe is Kerry's essential unfitness for office. You may want to knock one off the list, because he didn't actually sign the letter...or agree with its contents.

So, here's a question...how many of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth actually know they "signed" the letter? This is more a Crooked Timber or Matt Yglesias brand of rumination, but what brand of epistemological truth are the Swifties covered under?

Also, is the Nader campaign behind this? It sounds like the brand of rank incompetence we've come to know gently grimace at from them.

What's An Austria?

Fact-checking Arnold.

Hope Is Far Away

So I guess they've left hopeful optimism to us, then:

And I guess it's no use getting upset about it, but it'd be nice to see the media reporting the difference between the Democratic convention, where overt attacks on Bush were verbotem, and the Republican one, where the orders came from on high to take the gloves off. There are a fair number of storylines that, had the Democrats acted like the Republicans or seen the weak poll numbers Bush recently enjoyed, the media would have attached to our detriment. As it is, they make cursory appearances in the daily analysis but don't merit the repetition and newsworthiness they'd boast were we on the receiving end.

Update: Yes verbotim, not verbatim.

Ken Griffey's Grotesquely Swollen Jaw

I wrote about the fake "softball" game going on behind Bush last night over at Make Ohio Blue.

Bush's model for a second term is apparently Mr. Burns.

Liveblogging the Bushies

I'm in plain text, jesse's in italics.

Listen, I don't want to rag on the Bush twins, but they are giving the most awful speech I've ever seen in my life. I realize that this is a tough thing to do, but it was inexcusable to allow speechwriters to create such a smarmy, adults-idea-of-a-sassy-kid tone. Using their moment on the podium to make lame pop culture references and parent's-don't-like-boyfriends humor is insulting to every member of my generation; they had a moment to say something important, even if it was important with a partisan message, they could have made the moment count. They failed; much like their father has for four years.

Now Bush is introducing Laura via satellite -- he's standing in front of a fucking softball game. A softball game. The President has traveled to a fucking late-night sandlot to show his reg'lar guy credentials and note that he too loves his wife. This family sucks. They have absolutely no respect for the historic nature of their position and nowhere near the dignity to refrain from pretending they're jus' ordinary folks.

Laura Bush just touted the Founding Fathers for giving us a near-perfect document upon which to build our nation. Uh oh. Better go hug some black people to heal that gaffe!

Jesse's given up on this shit ("My husband was the first to fund stem-cell research) and I'm pretty much there too. We love you guys, but this is just too painful.

Liveblogging The Arnold

I'm in plain text, Jesse's in italics.

News of the night, Arnold has admitted he's a terrible actor. And he's revealed that he grew up in Austria. I think that if he can talk about that all the time, then his father's Nazi ties and his own sympathy for Hitler should be as fair a target as John Kerry's time in Vietnam.

Didn't Ann Coulter make fun of Norman Mineta for telling this same story? And Arnold's really taken up the mantle of masturbating to American history that's served many a Republican well over the years, although the fact that he's crediting Nixon for his conversion to Republicanism strikes a weird chord. At least in the sense that the greatness of America is its most corrupt overlord destroying a liberal challenger.

The delegates, the entire convention, are much more hostile to Democrats than the DNC was to the Republicans. In Boston, it was "Bush has done a bad job." In New York, it's "John Kerry is a scumsucking bitch."

Arnold's speech clarifies the Republican argument for dominance -- America kicks ass. And America is Republicans. It's pretty weak stuff. And now Arnold is praising Nixon and burying Hubert Humphrey; doesn't this sort of judgment get one barred from keynoting future conventions?

Arnold is proud to be part of the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt (me too!), Reagan and George W. Bush. George H.W Bush is, apparently not so inspiring. Arnold believes immigrants are welcome in the Republican Party so long as they work hard and play by the rules; he, of course, smoked pot and took steroids, but never mind. He also believes that disagreeing with the Republicans on some issues is what makes America great. It stands to reason that disagreeing with them on all issues would make America great. And voting them out of office? Fucking stupendous.

Now Arnold is one the "if you believe in happiness and smiles, you are a Republican". I don't think anyone in the world is convinced by these rhetorical pot brownies.

First, I say that I do support building human-style robots and sending them back in time to kill Osama bin Laden before he launches Skynet.

Even though nothing he's saying makes sense, it makes for good sound bites. No, standing behind your decisions because you believe they're right is not a good thing once everyone in the world except you understands that it's wrong. The guy standing in the middle of the desert with the parka and the mittens may swear to the death he was right, but he's still about to be a dehydrated corpse on a sand dune.

"The President didn't go to Iraq because the polls said it was popular."

No, he went to the UN because polls said it was popular. And he went into Iraq in March because August is a bad time to roll out a new product.

Arnold's giving a very good speech. It doesn't all make sense and much of it lacks internal coherency, but he's doing a very good job. That doesn't change the fact that he's not talking about Republicans, but about America. The entire strategy behind this convention seems to ignoring the party and focusing on the country, even the parts of it Republicans disagree with (New York, poor people in need of compassion, etc). It makes for good television, but I don't think it wins Bush any votes. I can appreciate convincing Republican speeches, this simply isn't one of them. One either believes these things are true or they aren't, agrees with Arnold's predictions or they don't, but anything this smiley has to be backed up by individual experience if its ring is to be anything but hollow.

Now, with a chant of four more years, Arnold's darted from the stage. The speech good but, as I said earlier, it didn't do Bush much good. But, as with most things Arnold does, it was for him. He's trying to curry favor with the party so they'll push the constitutional amendment that'd allow him to run for president. The Party's played these "presidential aspiration chips" for all they're worth, bringing McCain, Giuliani and Schwarzenegger into the fold. We'll see what good it does him.

Question for Michael Steele

Which of the following does not belong: Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr., or Ronald Reagan?

And for someone who came to the stage and derided Obama for giving a conservative speech, he's certainly given a Democratic one. Ending "the blight of poverty" has not exactly been a George Bush priority.

The Day After Compassion

Today, the Big Apple was beset by a virtual onslaught of Republican compassion, with nearly 30 delegates arrested for excessive hugging, and another 240 detained for illegally loitering outside of area McDonald's, believing it was a food bank.

The key to all of this is the Republican party's theme days, which seem to be the method acting version of the convention facade - they all have to live GOP "compassion", dammit, or else the claim isn't real. I'm not saying that none of the delegates do charity work, that none of them are good people. Instead, I'm saying that being called to service for a whole five hours every four years isn't quite the greatest realization of sweeping "compassionate" policy. It's great that the Maryland delegation goes and serves food to the homeless, or the Georgia delegation goes and picks up litter in the streets.

But if you think about that, who's best suited to fulfill those roles? Government. Government cleans the streets, it organizes food banks, etc. Even the faith-based initiative is the government funding outside operations which fulfill those needs. As a political statement, while the Day of Service may make you a quarter-day good samaritan, it fails to address how Republicans actually want to use the power they're pursuing to promote compassion in society. If the GOP's plan is to bring a bunch of die-hard partisans to various metropolitan areas around the nation for a week at a time, spending tens of millions of dollars of the party's and the city's money to help a few people for the cameras and the nighttime speeches, then fine. It's crap public policy, and removed from the purpose of the convention, but it's at least a concrete, executable plan.

And slightly more sensical than this.

Heuristics

I've written a pretty large post on how a president as bad as Bush is able to appeal to a broad swath of Americans. Go check it out.

Getting Bit In The Badonkadonk

Bush says we can win the war on terror, then says we can't, then says we can again. Not particularly surprising, except that the timing of the convention forced Bush to go back on what he said faster than normal, condensing a normally painful several month or year process into a couple of days, at least alleviating the flow of a few hundred "Bush contradicted himself why won't you listen?" blog posts and stories over the next few weeks.

However, it did shift the focus of the debate to the point where Democrats and Repulicans are both apparently in agreement that the war on terror (and, more accurately, terrorism) can be won...which has ceded the grounds of the debate to bullshit, de facto favoring Republicans.

If it was a calculated strategic move, it was brilliant, as it involved a controversy which lasted all of a day and allowed Bush to revert to his previous, "stronger" position of the past few years. If it wasn't...it still works to his favor, as Democrats now denounced him for not taking their position, which was his old, nonsense position that Democrats didn't really stand by.

It was a better move than we'll probably ever know on Bush's part, if only because it removes the political arrow from Kerry's quiver of forming a long-term plan to fight terrorism without destroying the entire Middle East in the process.

We Just Don't Communicate Anymore

I knew I shouldn't have taken Matt to see Lewis Black last night, now he's railing against illogical Republicans and dreaming about beating the hell out of them. So much for centrism.

More substantively, Matt's first is a must-read; arguing with Republicans now resembles atheist/theist debates. The two sides simply don't have a similar view of the world; if God created the world than logical problems with religion don't mean anything; religion occupies a far higher plane of truth than our puny logic can possibly assail. Meanwhile, the atheist working backwards finds the contradictions on fallacies to disprove God's existence -- the two views bum rush right past each other, they've got no common ground on which to meet. Similarly, as Lewis Black noted last night, "If you've been reading the headlines for the past year and the word 'fuck' never popped into your mind well, we've got nothing to talk about."

Amy and Laura

In light of the lovely Amy Sullivan's departure to the Washington Monthly, the Gadflyer has brought on the equally lovely and also Washington Monthly-affiliated Laura Rozen. She's about the best you'll read on international affairs -- check her out.

Update: Inside joke from the last Monthly dinner. Nevermind.

Republicans For Choice?

Last night, we went to the Planned Parenthood "Big Tent" benefit concert, featuring Lewis Black, Moby, Lou Reed, and a bevy of other pro-choice luminaries. As one might expect, it was an enjoyable evening marked by a number of terrific performances. Interestingly, there was some focus on the Republicans for Choice; a Log Cabinesque cadre of masochists attempting to turn the party of Gary Bauer into something Eve Ensler could be comfortable in. While most of the acts lauded these brave iconoclasts, some mocked and jabbed them. I, being the appeasing centrist I am, wondered what was happening to our tent, and made note of the dissonance to my girlfriend.

Her answer was, essentially, "fuck them". Republicans for choice are like suicidals for life; to vote Republican is to actively organize against choice. That they want to change their party means nothing; they're losing the battle and as long as they keep strengthening the right, rather than working to prove that the Democrat's cultural policies enjoy a societal mandate, they entrench the pro-life forces of this country.

I'm unsure on where to take this -- Kate's point makes sense to me, but my instincts are to support efforts to reform the Republican Party. Nonetheless, I don't see any way to make the Republican party pro-choice without crushing it and forcing them to reevaluate their entire extremist agenda. So long as they're dependent on the Christian Right -- and there can be no doubt that they are -- they simply can't change, their coalition can't survive that break. But it's an interesting question: Can we make the Republican Party the party of this week's keynoters rather than their presidential nominee? Or must we simply accept their extremism and present ourselves as the sole sane choice?

A Picture For You

Sorry blogging's been a bit slow, I'm typing out a few fast as I can. For now, enjoy this picture of Jesse, Matt Stoller, my girlfriend Kate and myself. Now it's back to my theory on GOP manipulation of heuristics.

RNC Convention Open Thread #2

You know the drill.

The Party Doesn't Believe In Bush

Via Marceau Marceau, proof positive that the base listens to Bush on matters of touchy political import.

After all, overt mockery of a veteran's war service at your political convention is exactly what President Bush stands for.

It's amazing - there's a man these Republicans deeply believe in, one they believe is not only competent and successful, but also innately chosen to lead, whether by divine intervention or by simple circumstance. He is a man whose instincts are keen and correct, whose moral vision and leadership is unparalleled.

Yet, when he asks them to do the Republican version of not eating the apple from the tree, they not only climb up and eat the thing, they call over to Mott's and ask them to start up the cannery, because they's gonna be having applesauce tonight.

If he can't even convince his own party not to act like total assholes for four days, how is he going to convince North Korea not to act like total assholes for the next four years?

W Stands For Words

Bush's appeal to female voters is "W Stands For Women".

I'll just leave it at the fact that his name is now George Women Bush and wonder how many porn jokes this ticket wants us to make about them. What's next? "George Wants You To Hit The G-Spot"? "Dick's Long And Hard On Love For The Country?"

Everytime I Come Around Your City, Bling Bling

Republican moderates are stepping up to the plate and facing down the fierce pitcher that is an inattentive public, trying to keep a moderate stance in the batter's box when they get thrown the high heat. After a ball, and two outside strikes, they've fouled off several pitches before a squirrel ran onto the field and delayed play for ten minutes.

Oh, right, the actual metaphor. Dammit.

Anyway, the major story of the convention thus far is the moderate parade, and whether or not it's actually the Republican Party - most conservative Republicans will say no, but they believe in what us conservatives believe in, which, like, makes us moderate. The moderates are pretty much in agreement - but the interesting thing is seeing what happens when they go on stage. There are really two ways the moderate invasion could go:

1.) Moderates get onstage and chastize the party for being insufficiently moderate, laying out a political path the party should follow. Has roughly the same chance of happening as Lynne Cheney reading Sisters to the delegates between speeches.

2.) The moderates use whatever credibility they have to point out what they like about the GOP without pointing to whatever is they don't like about the GOP, thus painting a picture of the party as the party of moderation rather than the moderates as the liberal wing of a conservative party.

What happens with number two, though, is that it continually feeds into the predetermined narrative the media's already come up with. It actually may help some with the conservative base; "Conservatives showcase moderates" transmits that the party truly is conservative. But at the same time, it seems purposeless to have salesmen (and they're all men, oddly enough) without a product, people selling you the concept of a well-functioning lemonade stand knowing good and damn well that they're never going to actually be selling lemonade.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but the Republicans seem like either way, they're going to be fooling the wrong people no matter the time.

Good Point

Bush's verbal gaffe was nothing of the sort, it was a completely honest statement that almost every Democrat believes. It's only because both sides are so desperate for a leg up that we jump all over it. That's not the right reason.

In case some of you are totally lost, today, Bush said:

Those who use terror as a tool are significantly more acceptable in the world today -- they're rampant in Iraq, they're resurgent in Afghanistan, they're rampaging Sudan, and they're plotting worldwide. Terror becomes less acceptable when populations foster goodwill, not white-hot hatred, towards the intended target. So long as Bush continues his ill-planned and remarkably unpopular ventures into Arab countries, particularly with all the torture and detonated weddings seemingly inherent to the enterprises, terror will be ever more acceptable because weak and humiliated populations will be ever more eager to see us hurt. Bush was right in what he said, and it's the best argument for why he's wrong to head this country.

Messing Up All Over Again

Given how godawful many of the GOP bloggers thought the Democratic convention coverage was, it's fun to hop on past the convention blog aggregator and watch the ridiculousness in motion.

Jason Sehorn and Angie Harmon - look where they are in the schedule. Angie's soooo hot!

Ken Mehlman likes my blog - and, I think, Sanrio! Captain Ed has the lowdown that Ken Mehlman is still lying about Kerry's record. But the sumbitch did it in person!

Air America is here, it's queer, it doesn't want any more beer.

Roger Simon finds kinship with Ed Koch, for some bizarre, yet spiritually fulfilling reason.

WIMMIN!

The Republicans send by more flacks. Wild and crazy predictability ensues.

The improvement is immeasurable. Why it can't be measured, however, is a whole other story.

Ezra's got a post below on why it's ri-goddamn-diculous that the coverage of the protesters is (again, predictably) being covered as Kerry's "base".

Tacitus Jumps The Shark

I don't mean to be harsh but, well, is Tacitus a raging idiot, or a slow-burning moron? Now now, I can hear you guys saying "No, he's just dishonest", and that may well be true, but I'm a naive optimist.

What am I talking about? This post, where he ventures out of the convention hall and takes his place, mockingly, among the people:

• A guy in a speedo;

• A sign pledging "Solidarity with the Resistance in Iraq!";

• Somebody dressed like a Palestinian terrorist;

• A Socialist worker from the ISO,

• And a guy wondering why America isn't safer.

In order, Tacitus seems to believe that people in Speedos are Kerry voters (there's no evidence of this) and bad Americans, that the Democratic base wants the Iraqi resistance to murder our soldiers, Palestinians love Kerry, socialists like Kerry(!?), and wondering why we're not safer is anti-American. And Tacitus further believes the ISO, guys in speedos, the Iraqi resistance, people who dress like Palestinians, and the International Socialist Organization "are the people who will have a voice in the governance of the United States if Kerry wins." Italics his.

And so I ask again. Is Tacitus a moron, an idiot, or, best case scenario, a simple liar? And whatever the correct answer is, what the fuck were we thinking when we lauded him as the John McCain of the blogosphere? And what transformed him into our very own Lyndon LaRouche?

They're Just Kids...

Over at the LA Weekly, Josh Bearman went, rightfully and entertainingly, ape-shit crazy on the pretension and careerism displayed at the Media Reception. The piece is entertaining and elegantly states the criticisms comprising the current case against the media, but it also, I think, suffers from too little sympathy towards journalists.

Now, I'm a biased audience here. I've been hanging out with the DC journalists and have potentially been brainwashed and implemented with microchips that assimilate me into their collective (a small price to pay if they help me get work in a few years). Nonetheless, the DC culture -- similar to the NY and LA cultures -- holds networking, rolodexes, and appearances as critical ingredients to professional advancement. Josh is blessed to work with the LA Weekly, an alternative paper where the culture consciously eschews hand-shaking for more old-school, and journalistically correct, methods of advancement. But being a journalist is, like everything else, a profession, and you have to excel in it to feed your family and advance in it to get to the well-read publications and work, to some extent, within its confines if you expect to do either of the last two.

That said, I think the general problems with journalism are not the careerist aspects of it, which do more to make the individuals obnoxious but less to screw the eventual product -- the choice isn't personal humility or the product's truth, the two are separate. The problems in journalism are systemic issues dealing with coverage, balance, objectivity, parochialism and equality of sources (Mr. Expert and Sam the Loon quoted with no distinction) and on these, Josh rightfully and eloquently nails the press corps to the wall. But young journalists, like young everythings, are an insecure bunch hoping, praying to make a good impression on their betters and appear desirable to members of the opposite sex. We're just slaves to our business cards and our hormones -- evolution is overrated.

The World's Worst Protestors

Okay, so we've been criticizing the protests we've been seeing in New York...but damn, if you want to see some awful shit, the right seems to be set out to do it bigger and worser than any liberal/Democratic protestor here.

First, the dumb:

Then, the evil:

Fantastic.

What Do We Want? Things! When Do We Want Them? At A Time To Be Determined

To piggyback on Ezra's post below, I'm reminded of nothing so much as various college protests in being here. Not in scale or even necessarily focus, but in the sense that organizational competency and visual impression count for a lot more than the message itself.

On Saturday, I attended a panel hosted by the New Democratic Majority which talked about protests. Very little of it had to do with what they were protesting - the vast majority of the conversation was about the meaning of protests (divorced from their efficacy), which came down to this: we protest because it's an exercise of free speech which we can't lose for when it's actually going to be useful.

RNC Open Thread

Talk amongst yourselves.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Matt hits on an old favorite of mine, the ideological incoherence of protests. Somewhere along the way -- and by the way, I mean between the Civil Rights/Vietnam era and now -- protests became a forum for self-expression rather than a calculated political action. Enter almost any rally, and you'll find yourself awash in a sea of disparate, and often conflicting, political arguments. From Palestine to capitalism to gay rights to Tibet to Iraq to Kerry to Nader to anarchy to woman's rights, they all mix into the event's message, making the product a muddled mass of bodies assembled for...things, rather than a uniform group advocating an single policy. That explains the "how many bodies" reporting the media does; it's a more interesting storyline if they focus on the many issues and numerous entertaining signs the protest contains, rather than the singular issue it's ostensibly about, and so their only way to telegraph excitement over the cause is to count the bodies arrayed in the square.

Now, there's a utility in protests as free-expression -- I generally believe we'd be better off with more forums for free political opinion and many more avenues for citizen involvement. However, if the aim is to affect US policy, these protests have no chance of doing so, and even though they demonstrate ardent opposition to a policy, they forget that American politics operates off opinion spread, not fervency. If most Americans are nominal supporters of this or that venture, the politician is generally safe; if most Americans are generally opposed, the pol won't touch it. But if most are nominally in support while a sizable minority is completely opposed, the depth of the minority's opposition matters only insomuch as they use their influence to change other's minds and work to defeat/elect opposed/sympathetic leaders. Simply organizing the opposed minority in one place is no threat to the politicians backing the offensive program; so long as the protesters are in the public square, they're not leafletting for a local candidate or talking to their neighbors. So let's call protests what they are -- forums for expression and activist interaction. What they aren't -- at least in the form they've taken for the past 10 years -- is effective political organizing.

Planned Parenthood March

I had found the lair of the feminazis. Thousands of them wrapped in garish pink and screaming man-hating slogans back at the queen bee leading their chants from the stage. And the best part was, none of it was true.

Well, except for the pink. There was an awful lot of hot pink at the Planned Parenthood march, but the aggression of the hue was discordant from the quietly dignified marchers who wore it. That the energy level rarely exceeded that of a Sunday stroll was surprising, but somehow fitting. I say fitting because 30 minutes prior that my girlfriend and I had arrived at Cadwell Park, accidentally stumbling into the staging area and wondering how a PP rally had failed to attract more than 25 people. We were quickly pointed round a corner that revealed a good 3,000 people playing call-and-response with the speaker's on the stage, waving signs and wearing the uniform colors that mark a well-organized rally. Surprisingly, men littered the audience, outnumbered by women, yes, but highly visible nonetheless.

Aside from one freudian slip/terribly improper moment when a call and response swapped the word "bigot" for "born again Christian" (note to organizers: always demonize groups potential supporters can choose to disassociate from; bigots might not believe they're bigots, born-agains are under no illusions as to the labels applicability), the on-stage leaders focused on unity, the preservation of choice, and the need to place a positive face on the movement.