Tuesday Night Freakout Part II
The RNC
I spent two weeks watching the Democratic and the Republican National Conventions. My eyes began to ache from all the political carnage I was watching, but little did I know how much my brain would ache after the RNC.
I already had written to my friend Ron about what I thought of the DNC. Basically some crappy speakers aside, it appealed heavily to my lettuce eating latte drinking limp wristed liberal sensibilities. The sets were awesome, there were some amazing speeches from several people including Kerry ‘08 (not the wuss boy 2004 version) Gore ‘08 (see also: Kerry ’08, replace 2004 with 2000) and the Clintons, and Obama’s big speech was one of the most epic things I had ever heard. The polls were in the “Good Guys” favor, everyone was in a good mood and resolute and stout in their convictions, and the Monday of the RNC had been cancelled. Of course, none of this could last forever.
Sarah Palin, the Fargo Mom from Alaska, was chosen as the Republican VP nominee. Despite being an obvious ploy for women voters, she doubled in revving up the most hardcore Conservative of the Republican base and tripled in being so popular (as the RNC would reveal). The thunder was seemingly stolen from Obama’s speech the night before, and the whole entire game had changed.
I never even suspected Palin simply because she said earlier in the year she would not get involved because she wanted to care for her new kid, whom had Downs’s Syndrome. The move was both risky and effective on McCain’s part, although only time can tell if it was more one than the other.
Also, why don’t Presidential Nominees declare their VP on the same day? I would have liked to have seen McCain’s choice in that scenario.
Anyway, the RNC.
The set was actually pretty cool and simplistic, contrasting with the American Idol looking set at the DNC. Some people joked that it looked like the stage for a Nazi rally. I seriously began to consider this after Wednesdays set of speeches.
Tuesday’s main speakers were Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman. Thompson, the actor and former Republican nominee who bailed out during the Primaries, spoke with more energy and interest than he ever did at any point during the Republican Primaries. Despite him talking about field dressing moose’s and something about some old guy being tortured or something and sounding like Foghorn Leghorn (a feeling that I was justified in having after The Daily Show said the same thing), he riled up the troops. If he had decided to be this good of a speaker a few months earlier, things right now might be different (most likely not).
The big speaker of the night was Judas Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat who you might remember from other failures in his life such as the 2000 Elections when he ran with Gore against Bush. He spoke about how Democrats can be Republicans as well, so long as they thought just like Republicans and started calling themselves “Independents”. The night was pretty much over as Lieberman paled in comparison to Thompson, most likely because Lieberman was not in fucking Die Hard 2 like Thompson was.
Oh wait, Bush spoke in a canned video, endorsing McCain and talked about the Angry Left. Bush talking about the Angry Left is like me calling a Tiger angry after I stuck it in a cage and poked it with a spear a few times. Why so Serious, Leftists?
Wednesday night was the night when, to me, things rounded a corner as to my perception of the General Election and the Republican Party in general.
Mitt Romney was the first big speaker of the night; his good looks and slimy slicked back hair making him look like a television shows parody of a politician. His speech was the most glaring example of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever seen and is, in a perfectly contained twenty minute nut shell, everything that I feel is wrong and deplorable about the Republican Party as it exists today. It, like the rest of the night, encompassed lies, distortion, hypocritical thinking and hate mongering, the values a good true Neo Con holds near and dear. It was maddening to a Lovecraftian degree, as he frequently blamed others for problems that his party helped create.
“We’re the party of Big Ideas, not Big Broher!” was an actual line of his. Right, because you’re not a member of the party that created some of the most invasive measures that has ever been produced by Big Government, the Government that’s mostly run by the same party you claim is the party of Big Ideas. It’s kind of like you raping someone in the ass, and then telling the victim about how much of an asshole their friend is for raping them in the ass.
He blamed everything on liberals. Liberals, liberals, liberals, liberals. I’m pretty sure the toilet at my job got stopped up. Why? Because of LIBERAL use of toilet tissue! Hurricanes are, of course, caused by LIBERAL amounts of wind and water. What he never said was that most of the Nations problems were caused by LIBERAL amounts of Republicans running everything.
It was utterly bizarre. He blamed everything on the people in Washington and controlling everything…despite the fact that it’s the Conservative party he was talking about. It was very strange and had some sort of disruptive effect on my thought processes. Then he began to talk about Islamo-facsists and turned the speech into a war mongering rally.
Huckabee spoke next. Despite the fact that he is creepy levels of crazy, he is a very good speaker. He was slightly calming after the Romney debacle, but he continued the tried and true Republican tradition of blatant lying by screwing up facts and literally saying that Palin got more votes in Alaska than Biden did during the Primaries, which is so inherently wrong there is no way to spin it into reality. Except the party runs on Verbal Reality. I say it, it must be true.
Next was Guil9/11ianni, “America’s Mayor”. His speech was terminally long, and included yet more lies with more snark and sideswipes at Obama, including the start of the already infamous mocking of Obama’s status as a Community Organizer. He made fun of Obama’s supposed elitism, saying that he did not think Obama thought Alaska and small town America was “Cosmopolitan” enough, which is a fucking sight coming from the former mayor of fucking New York City, the City that was Cosmo before Cosmo was hilariously homosexual.
To his credit, I think there was very little mention of 9/11.
…
NINE ELEVEN
And then, the main event. Sarah Palin.
First, let me do some self referencing. From a post last week:
“Only from a few different people, and somehow with more blatant xenophobia and overt filth thrown in for good measure. I’m not sure I could even post Romney’s speech, as I think the link would be acidic to the point of burning through my monitor.
One of the key moments of last night was this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/03/sarah-palin-rnc-conventio_n_123703.html
And it was awful. Well, not technically. It was a great performance (as Kiki McClean called it, perfect theatre). It was a well written speech (thanks to a top Bush speech writer). It got people fired up. Both sides, I think.
I got angry. I got angry for, among so many other things, the lies, the ignorance, the smug satisfaction, the hypocrisy. Why did I ever bother to watch it?”
Outside of a few anecdotal pieces, you can tell that none of what she was saying was actually from her own self. You can tell she had did not know what she was saying. She had all the conviction of an actor reciting a monologue. Good performance but you knew there was nothing past the words. It’s like how people describe Obama, that is all talk, no substance, only in Palins case it was true. Even after the speech, you still don’t know what she truly has to say outside of old archived clips. Notice how she has yet to speak to the media without a script. It’s because the GOP are afraid she’ll slip up, so right now when she’s not doing stumped speeches they have her locked away in a dungeon somewhere, chained like the main character from A Clockwork Orange, her eyes pried open, watching and taking in the orgy of Republican beliefs and talking points as spliced sound bites of Reagan and Bush crawl out the speakers. She is their T-1000 in this election and when they feel she is fully programmed, they will release her onto the press scene.
“But Andre,” you might say. “She already has an interview scheduled with ABC’s Charles Gibson soon.”
“Yes,” I’ll say. “An interview with a man who hates Obama and was booed for how horrible of a moderator he was during the Democratic Primary Debates. If he asks her a question tougher than ‘How are you?’ I will be surprised.”
Yet Obama went into the Lions Den that is The O’Reilley Factor and Biden was on Meet the Press recently.
So Palin knocked it out of the park, which is easy to do when the bar is set so low for you all you have to do is trip over it. Her speech energized the Republican base, she is, ironically, a huge celebrity now, rumors and scandals are being reported and, occasionally, debunked. She had some tough words to say about Obama including the oh-fuck-you-bitch line about how a Mayor of Alaska is like a Community Organizer, but with actual responsibility and the focus and thunder has been placed firmly on her, freshly taken away from Obama and the DNC. She even had almost as many people watch her speech as they did with Obama.
The next night was McCain’s speech which was peppered with two or three protestors, including a young Iraq War veteran who had a “Vets Against Iraq” shirt on with a sign that read “You can’t win an occupation”. The guys name was Andrew Kokesh and he’s my new hero.
McCain gave his speech. It had very little attacks on Obama (because, like a coward who won’t fight his own battles, he let everyone else do it the previous night). He continued on in detail about his torture, continued to try and co-opt “change” and “hope” from Obama, praised Palin, and gave us more rosy promises of the future. It went on for fifty minutes.
The speech ended, balloons were dropped. The Liberal media loved his speech (not as much as Palin’s) and called him the Reformed Maverick. Not counting possible PBS and online viewers, he even got slightly bigger ratings than Palin and Obama. The Party came together and the bump continued, putting McCain up by as much as ten points in some polls (USA Today, which is a horrible polling system) and an average of about 4-5 points (from Gallup and Rasmussen, more legitimate). Everyone loved Palin, the Republicans are riding high, and everything is wrong but Right with the world.
I sat at home and milled about in my life, disgusted.
“..The Right Side of History…”
You know who the best speechwriter is for the Republicans? For the McPalin campaign? Obama. If it was not for Obama showing up with his (mostly self written) speeches about hope and change, McCain would have nothing to steal.
Another thing I noticed: go look at the DNC. Then go get a case of Vodka and watch the RNC. The DNC was all about unity, bringing together both the party and the nation. You know what the RNC was? A dividing convention. It was all about US (the small town Republicans with the millions of dollars) versus THEM (THE LIEberals!). It was full of war and hate and drawing lines in sand. The DNC was uplifting, the RNC was an appeal to the most base and savage of human instincts, the need for war, the need to feel superior to someone, the call to arms. It’s a tactic they have won with many times.
It’s very discouraging, being an Obama supporter, being someone who sits on the left side of matters in this country, sitting by, doing what you can, but still feeling as if the promise of a better tomorrow is being taken away - again - by the same despicable methods that always win. They lie; no one will ever call them out on it. The media will back down to every demand they make. They dictate the double standard that defines America. Could you imagine if a Democrat VP nominee was picked with the EXACT same credentials and the EXACT same lightening rod for controversy like Sarah Palin? The parties hope would die immediately. But Republicans can always get away with that. Because they have their hands in the right pockets. No one seems to care. No one seems to want to call them out on their hypocritical statements or their blatant fabrications. Republicans are attempting to cage voters in several key States, that is dump hundreds of thousands of voter registrations by claiming BS excuses so that when November comes around, hundreds of thousands of people can no longer vote. It has worked before and they are doing it again. But no one wants to say anything.
The national polls are in the Republicans favor. It does not matter that Palin is a religious nut who has outright lied about nearly everything in her speech, she’s popular and many people want to flock to her. It does not matter that McCain with his Stepford Wife and his strained and lecherous smile, more fitting for a pedophile than a politician, continues to stammer and know nothing of which he speaks. He is obviously a maverick, despite the fact that this is coming from a man who is as entrenched in the Washington Grind as they come. He has sided with Rick Davis who said recently that they are making the campaign about personality rather than issues, making the election ironically about style over substance, fiction over fact. The party conspires everyday to keep America in their clutches, suffocating the country like Frankenstein’s Monsters hands over the throat of a little girl. And it all sucks, because “What can you do besides donate and volunteer?”
Christ it’s like The Empire Strikes Back.
Any Obama supporter can tell you that this was going to be difficult from the start. People wonder why the race is as close as it is, when you realize that it should not even be this close. Obama should be losing by fifty points. Here is the first viable black candidate for the presidency with an unfortunate name and a Democrat going against a grizzled war hero Republican. Yet somehow, things are in a dead heat and, right now, there is almost s much chance of McCain winning as there is Obama winning. Whatever I usually say about this country, it’s amazing that a black dude can run for president and be this close to the White House.
That said, there’s still a lot of work to be done on the Obama side to see to it that McCain does not get the White House. Obama’s Fifty State Strategy has been registering a record amount of young voters, which might offset the caging business. We won’t really see the results of the Strategy until after the election, as polls don’t typically account for the newly registered voters.
The polls are in a dead heat which is impressive considering that, despite the star power; the RNC bump was very light. This time last week Obama was ahead by about 6-9 points.
After Palin spoke, ten million dollars were donated in the manner of a day…to Obama. Like it has been said before, she has energized more than one party.
While Obama is slightly down nationally, he does have the lead on the Electoral Map which, if he maintains, would lead to a victory.
There are still over fifty days until V-Day. A lot can happen in that time, both positive and negative. The next big step now is the debates, three presidential and a potentially interesting Vice Presidential debate. We see how much training Palin has had, and get to see how much of a wild dog Biden is supposed to be when it comes to debates.
Above all else, I have confidence in this race because of Obama’s judgment. He tries to stay on issues (which was sorely lacking from the RNC. Obama gave blueprints and ideas, the RNC had nothing) and plus he was able to get people around him who were so good; they were able to beat a Clinton in the Democratic Primaries.
It’s going to be close. In a perfect world, of course, I’d love to see Obama win comfortably with no stress or worry, up ninety points. But obviously, this is no perfect world. I’m worried about a McCain win because I think it will be disastrous, as evidenced by the past eight years and the mentality I saw at the RNC.
To cut all manner of bullshit, I want Obama to win. As decidedly as possible. If not, I worry that the apathy in this country will increase even more as Americans find that their vote truly does not matter. I’m worried about what would happen on a global scale. I’m worried about how another Republican presidency would ruin this country. Obama is not the Messiah, he’s not the End All Be All, but in a binary election, I strongly feel he is the best choice we got.
Hillary Clinton spoke recently and, while it was not the most sincere response, she said something which I really liked and I think applies well to this race. She said that Obama was “…on the right of history,” in this race. And history will be made in November, but not in the sense that it will be the point future historians will use to pinpoint the beginning of the end of the USA as we know it, but in that Obama will get elected and we get steered into some semblance of a proper direction. I could be wrong, but I do think that Obama in this case is on the right side of history. Here’s hoping for a little Obama laced Change in November.