This is the climax of a long and successful Republican convention. I’m happy to see it end. I missed it up until the Lindsey Graham speech. I turned my television on earlier, saw Bill Frist, and shut it off. Bill Frist is, ostensibly, a physician. First, do no harm? Bill Frist was able to determine the brain activity of a woman after seeing a short video of her. He also took cats from animal shelters and performed heinous experiments on them. I don’t like Bill Frist, but he certainly has a home in the party of change.
The first thing that struck me is that Lindsey Graham is a pillow biter. I love pillow biters, but they’re usually not welcome at the Republican convention where everyone is rich, strikingly white, and straight as John McCain’s back. C’mon. Lindsey Graham walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. But, I guess he’s just a loner. I understand that. I’m a loner, too, a quiet one.
Lindsey says yay for the troop surge! The crowd goes mild! Odd, but he doesn’t get a good Republican reaction to his troop surge talk. He says the Obama campaign is built around losing in Iraq. Strange, then, that the Bush administration and the Iraqi government are adopting the Obama plan.
Lindsey says that McCain knows about straight talk. I have to laugh. If there’s one person in the room who doesn’t talk straight, it’s Lindsey Graham. I also wonder where the other Gramm is, Phil. He’s conspicuously absent. He’s McCain’s close friend and economic advisor who says this recession is psychological and we’re all whiners. That’s the economic advice McCain’s working with. Keep that in mind.
Lindsey thanks some god for Joe Lieberman. I don’t know if there’s a blanket god that covers South Carolina and Connecticut, Southern Baptists and Jews, but if there is, that must be the one he was talking to.
Now, Graham is excited because there’s a Muslim nation that rejects al Qaeda. I think he means Iraq. I assure you that Iraq rejected al Qaeda much more strongly with Saddam Hussein in power. He was very much against anyone getting in his way. The US invasion opened a lot of doors in Iraq to al Qaeda.
Graham says the Bush/McCain war in Iraq is one we can’t afford to lose. From what I’ve seen of the budget, it’s actually one we can’t afford to fight, and neither can those adopted children the Republicans were all showing off. But, they’ll all be wealthy enough that they’ll neither have to fight in the war nor pay taxes to support it.
Graham repeats the mantra that McCain would rather lose an election than lose a war. Is anybody listening to me? All that means is that he will fight wars even if the American people are against them. Does that sound like a responsible, democratically elected president?
TGITR! Thank Ganesh, it’s Tom Ridge! He’s usually not a terrible speaker, and he’s usually not insane. He says that McCain fights for the vulnerable. Is that how he’s pointing out that he’s pro-choice and McCain is anti-choice? If so, he just put himself in the unenviable position of saying that pregnancy tissue is vulnerable and McCain will protect it.
The camera just showed an old marine or something falling asleep in the crowd.
Ridge is a less shrill and less annoying speaker than Graham.
The camera cuts to someone dressed like Lincoln. Lindsey, Abraham Lincoln was the original Log Cabin Republican.
Now Ridge gets to the talking points, that is, that Obama is a bright and interesting speaker. Ridge says it’s not about talking pretty, it’s about talking straight. Graham talks neither pretty nor straight.
Ridge pulled out some paper. I secretly hoped that he’d roll a fatty on the podium.
He gets everybody chanting, “That’s John McCain!” During Palin’s speech, somebody should have got the crowd chanting, “Who’s that girl?”
They played a video after that. They said something about Cindy introducing John to his new home in Arizona, and innumerable and immemorial others, I presume. Then there was something about Cindy’s father being her inspiration, which, and again I assume, is why she married him.
Here comes the beer queen all in green with about 30 kids of all ages. She looks like an old Cindy Brady. She introduced all the kids and then there was a very awkward and long period during which she made a point of kissing them all. No tongue, at least not this time.
She said that our hearts go out to the victims of weather disasters, and then I think she added that it’s not natural for us to reach out to help. Maybe I was drunk on her family’s beer.
She says Americans are generous, and that she wants to get government under control and out of the way. Under the Bush/McCain government, it got out of the way completely during Katrina and the aftermath. Also, if Americans are generous, why do Republicans scream when asked to pay their fair share of taxes to support public schools, hospitals, etc?
She says McCain won’t break with heritage, which contradicts everything the Republicans have been trying to say about him.
She talks about guns and hockey, I think.
She calls herself a western, conservative mother. The Republicans know they have a fight in the west, which is finally seeing the reality of Republican rule, so they keep reaching out to push the west’s head back into the sand. The Republicans have always buried the realities of real, everyday life under guns and religion. Obama made that very easy this year. I, for one, am glad it’s on the table. It’s always been veiled under the heading of ‘freedom’ until this year.
Then there’s a bunch of military stuff. If you haven’t heard, John McCain was a POW, and he wants more kids to experience his happy fun time.
She says her father was a great, conservative, western American. What does John’s new church, the Baptist church, think about beer?
Cindy says, “In my box tonight is Ernestine.” That got my attention because I have a weird friend who calls me Ernestine.
Then the speech wanders again. Rwanda. Georgia.
John is not a Washington insider. Where has he been for the past 25 years? He must not be able to make friends very quickly.
This speech was an incoherent, meandering mess of unrelated ideas. It reminded me of something I would type, but it wasn’t clever. It wasn’t even mean.
Here comes a McCain video. I normally don’t watch propaganda videos. There haven’t been any really effective propaganda films since Leni Riefenstahl was working her magic. Why does McCain’s 300 year old mother look younger than him?
They say something like, “Change will come!” That’s funny. The more things Republicans change, the more they stay the same.
I hear the dulcet tones of Freddie Dalton Thompson. They are soothing, southern tones, no fancy Eastern Elitist words or sounds coming outta there, I’ll tell ya! “When you’ve lived in a box…”
McCain is on the catwalk. He’s too sexy for his shirt. So sexy, it hurts. He has a magic erection lectern that rises to the occasion.
Grampa makes it to the podium, and the crowd goes wild!
Somebody brings out a sign that says you can’t win an occupation. That’s the most sensible thing I’ve read on a sign at the convention. The crowd chants, “USA! USA!” I don’t know what that means, but perhaps it was an affirmation of the freedom of speech of those protestors. Now there’s a sign that says McCain votes against vets. That’s also, technically, correct. C’mon everyone! Shout them down!
McCain thanks Dubya for keeping us safe. I don’t completely understand how anyone could say Bush kept us safe. 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch. Nothing as big has happened since, but that doesn’t mean his inane policies succeeded. It only means that al Qaeda is patient. They’ve shown that before. The worst result of 9/11 was Bush/McCain’s extended and expensive war.
So far, this speech is bad, and he gives Laura and the old Bush their props. When he moves his arms, he looks like he’s fitting on a suit coat at Walmart. He’ll never know how it feels to buy clothes off the rack, however, and neither will anyone in his immediate family.
There’s Roberta! Right on! I guess she’s 96. Initially, I guessed 300 based on what John looks like.
Here’s the part where he talks about how much he respects Obama. Surprisingly, he doesn’t slip up and call him Osama. You know he wants to. After this kiss up, he’ll unleash the Republican shit machine to drag Obama down to the level where the American people decide, again, that there isn’t much difference between the two candidates, so why change dicks in the middle of a screw? It’s the Bush/McCain/Rove tactic.
He says he’ll get the country working again. That’s weird. His party screwed it up with him as one of its leaders.
There’s more disruption. That’s really annoying and counterproductive. What’s noteworthy, however, is that McCain called it ‘brown noise’, which is a tone that causes bowel movements. Maybe I heard it that way because my body was starting to raise a defense mechanism to what I was sure would be a long, tedious Republican speech. I can see the future. Or maybe I have irritable bowel syndrome. This political stuff always gives it to me.
McCain says that he’ll stand on your side and fight for your future. I think we can shorten that to, “I’ll stand on your future.”
He talks about his soul mate, Sarah Palin. That’s gotta piss Todd and Cindy off. They should have an affair.
McCain can’t wait to introduce Palin to Washington. He warns Warshington that change is coming. It remains to be seen how a barracuda does when swimming with sharks.
He carries on and on about fighting pork and big spenders. He says he’ll veto something.
He repeats the rather lose an election than lose a war thing. Please. See my previous thoughts on that.
He starts naming off people in states where the Republicans need to win. Notably, he doesn’t mention Utah, where they always win, or California, where they have absolutely no chance of winning. It’s all politics. It’s funny though, because one of the poor families he wants to help lost their real estate investments. Were they poor like the McCains?
He accuses Obama of giving welfare to oil companies, when in fact McCain is a lifelong member of the oil party. He calls the Republicans the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan. He supposedly means Teddy, but it invokes FDR. It’s that thing the Republicans are doing this time where they invoke Democrats. It’s icky.
McCain gives a shout out to immigrants, calling them god’s children. That’s just a nod. This is a party that’s decided it’s going to win with a whites-only campaign. Then he launches into the usual litany of right-wing nonsense.
Finally, he stops pandering to the wacky right, no wait, he didn’t. He tells people to quit whining about losing their jobs and get back to work. If you can’t get a job as good as your old one, then fuck you, you lazy, whiny sons of bitches!
Then he says education is a civil rights issue. He wants to shake up schools and give parents choices. He doesn’t want to give women with unwanted pregnancies *any* choices. Giving parents choices is about the Republicans getting rid of public schools so finally all children can learn that the Earth is a few thousand years old, was created in a week or less, is probably flat, and there’s so much oil under the North Slope of Alaska that every moose hunter in the world could drive their Hummer across the tundra to their personal oil and gas property where they can punch a hole in the ground, insert a hose, and fill their tank with beautiful, fully-refined, premium-grade Alaskan gasoline right out of the ground, for free!
He’s coming up with a policy idea now. It must be off the cuff, because he hasn’t had a coherent policy on anything for decades. He wants to stop trading money for oil and enriching people who don’t like us. Those people he refers to are often close personal friends of the Bush family and always staunch supporters of Republicans. He mentions drilling offshore. Notably, he doesn’t mention the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The crowd wants to drill babies again. They’re either abortionists or pedophiles. I don’t know which.
He wants more nuclear power plants. I hope they put one in every fucking neighbourhood. That way, if we ever do have a terrorist attack again, they will have countless soft targets with an immeasurable amount of radioactive material. The slogan for this is, “A Dirty Bomb in Every Neighborhood.”
Maybe Cindy can help the American children who end up like the ones at Chernobyl.
So, John says his policy will create jobs. I think he means jobs in the alternative energy business. How will that happen? Will they be government jobs, or just jobs based on government subsidies? How does that cut spending and shrink government?
He calls Georgia a ‘small, democratic’ neighbor of Russia. It is small, and more or less democratic. However, South Ossetia and Abkhazia would like to secede. It would seem that some nuance is needed in this type of conflict. It’s not just a case of Russia attacking its helpless, sweet lil neighbor.
Jesus! McCain just said that he hates war! That’s complete bullshit. Why would he offer 100 years of war in Iraq? Why would he say we’re all Georgians, and sing gleefully about bombing Iran and devote the entire convention to the military if he hates war? God, for dumb!
I think I had a mild heart attack.
Now he starts on a few policy issues again. He says we need to change how we do just about everything in Washington. We have to catch up to history. We have to change the way we do business. Bizarre. This is Obama’s campaign. McCain wants to fight the very thing that he represents in its entirety, the corrupt Republican party.
He keeps saying that the country, dominated by Republicans and Republican policies for 25 years, isn’t moving. He’s right, absolutely right. No argument there. Why, then, would we elect yet another Republican? It seems preposterous, but I never underestimate the ability of Republicans to scare people into voting against the interests of their country and for the interests of wealthy and powerful Republican elitists.
He reframes the ‘nam story. At the end he says that when he emerged he was no longer his own man, he was his country’s man. He was no longer his wife’s man, either. He made a lot of changes.
He mocks Obama. Something about not being anointed by history. I don’t know what he said.
He talks about helping people, which is something this party is completely unfamiliar with. He says nothing brings more happiness than to serve a cause greater than yourself. The cause in question, of course, is money.
He starts chanting a bunch of sentences that end with the word ‘fight’. The crowd is getting more and more excited. I must be missing something. Then, in a furious climax of fight talk, it ends. Hillary carried on incessantly about fighting, too. It didn’t work for her.
Maybe there are some people in the country who are tired of fighting and would like to just live in relative peace and prosperity, like when Clinton was president.
They play a song called ‘Raising McCain’. I guess it’s about the POW experience, which isn’t going to be a ride at Disneyland, at least not if Obama is elected. Anyway, I don’t think it’s a good song for the campaign. It’ll only remind people that McCain looks like Reverend Henry Kane from Poltergeist II.
Then everybody walked around looking elated. The crowd jiggled and kicked balloons with their happy feet.
They played the song ‘Barracuda’, presumably for Sarah ‘Barracuda’ Palin.
I don’t know what that songs about, maybe a prostitute and a john, or a predatory person set to take advantage of you, or about a controversial shirtless album cover, but I think the line, “If the real thing don’t do the trick, you better make up something quick.” summarizes the Republican convention perfectly. The real thing, which is that McCain/Palin is an old school, extreme right-wing, conservative ticket didn’t work, so they made up something quick. Unfortunately, what they’re making up is what Obama and the Democrats have been saying all along.
Change.
Good night, my friends!
Tags: barracuda, Cindy McCain, convention, democratic, fight, iraq, John McCain, katrina, lindsey graham, Obama, phil gramm, raising mccain, republican, Sarah Palin, tom ridge
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