Random Notes Summing Up the End of Summer Bummer in St. Paul
“Fight with me! Fight with me!”
– John McCain in his acceptance speech at the GOP Con, Sept. 4, 2008, so desperate for combat he invited the audience to throw a punch at him.
The 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was entertaining and credible if you happen to have that happy zealot’s mindset indistinguishable from serious brain damage, or you’re a member of the Inner Party with a large Memory Hole nearby and a strong stomach. Indeed, George Orwell could have written the script for this GOP Con and you could hear echoes of the boot-heel patriotism of Oceania ringing in its blaring signage and loudly repeated declarations – “Country First!” “Service!” “Character Counts!” “War Hero!” “Reformer!” “Maverick!” “USA!” “Surge Working!” “NO-bama!” — simple themes for simple minds marinated in the bottomless pit of Big Media Infotainment Newspeak and endless wars against shifting enemies, buttressed by increasingly irrational rationales.
Yet never was heard a discouraging word against the Bush Administration and the avaricious corporate-Republican values for which it stands that have promulgated and prolonged the various disasters sinking us on every front – instead, Frank Luntz’s cheesy framing word “Washington” was employed so that the top-of-the-ticket ‘reformers’ had something to ‘change’ other than the guiding precepts of their own party and Sarah Palin’s prominently-displayed infant son. The unasked question that hung over the convention like a cloud from Hurricane Gustav: ‘Yes, Washington is even more corrupt than usual and we are descending into utter catastrophe – and who is responsible for causing all of this misery?’ He That Must Be Obliged But Otherwise Go Unmentioned appeared on the Jumbotron screen early in the evening on the first day, his embarrassing video endorsing McCain stuck into those hours of the evening when, presumably, small-town America was still having dinner and would never see the Bush Boy and think of his Unmentionable PNAC Partner-in-Crime Dick Cheney, the True Author of our rampant economic and global woes.
McCain and Palin both exhibited signs of having an out-of-party experience as they berated the soulless suppurating boils and abscesses populating the Potomac Swamplands in the form of Big Money lobbyists and Special Interests that have brought the country so low, without ever hinting that most of them had an RNC elephant logo on their money clips and the rapacious Jesus of Mammon in their born-again hearts. For that matter, most of the larger fish work in McCain’s own campaign. But perhaps the most comically surreal moment of the three nights came when Mitt Romney, formerly McCain’s dedicated primary foe, erupted from the podium with this public hallucination to the cheers of the damned and deranged:
“We need change, all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals.”
– Mitt Romney, Sept. 3, 2008.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/08-2
That’s the essence of the snake-eating-its-tail message emerging from St. Paul to unite the party – let’s toss out big-government liberals Bush and Cheney and start anew.
We’re Not Out of Touch – We’re Republicans Without Issues!
“This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”
– Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, quoted by the Washington Post’s The Fix blog.
To the party leaders and McCain’s campaign staff, ignorance is strength, and really the only strength McCain has left. If the public can be allayed by clever rhetoric, bamboozled by slick video bios, befuddled by down-is-up deceptions, or baffled by calculated bluster from determining the bitter truth about the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate for just two months, the GOP believes they can seize the White House for the third time in this new century.
The Tattlesnake – H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks Mom and Other Randomized Media Bleat Edition
Bush Two in a Pantsuit
or, Summer and Smoke and Mirrors
– It’s becoming pretty obvious that McCain’s Veep pick, Sarah Palin, regardless of the GOP blustering over her ‘smarts,’ is actually just the Bush Boy in a Beehive, a crackpot-religion dingbat from the Great White North with a predisposition to pathological deceit, close ties to big energy corporations, a willingness to use taxpayer money to help herself and her family, disregard for the law, and a slave of Talking Points with a lack of curiosity about, or grasp of, the world around her. While she may not mangle the English language as much as the Installed One, she hews to the same repetition of bumper-sticker slogans and shows her deep ignorance whenever she goes off-script. (Just look at her recent confusion when she tried to ad lib regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – she didn’t know they were already private companies with investors.) Since the GOP Convention, she’s been repeating the same speech provided her by – voila! – a Bush speechwriter! (Change you can believe in – if you’re an idiot.) Of course McCain’s Rovian handlers want to keep Gov. Gaffe-O-Matic from even the nearly-toothless jaws of the American Big Media – imagine the reaction if Independent Voters and others with any scrap of rationality remaining get the hint she’s another bumbling blank slate like the current Dunce Cap in the Oval Office – Disaster! — and there just aren’t enough Christopublican Whack-Jobs and Small-Town Dead-Enders to shoehorn Grandpa and the Beauty Queen into office.
Sure she’s going to have a sit-down with ABC’s Charlie “Capital Gains Tax” Gibson soon, but no doubt she’ll have the questions in advance and there will be a teleprompter off-camera to help her through the answers. Besides, ditzoid Gibson is an in-the-tank Republican fawner – he won’t be tossing any hardball faster than asking her to name her five children in order of birth and how the whirlwind of celebrity has affected her family. Perhaps there will even be a touching video tribute to the joys of snowmobiling featuring hubby Todd and the score from Rocky. Daughter Bristol could then host a fashion show of maternity clothes for high school girls, and Sarah could have her ‘fired’ cook talk Gibson through a diaper change of baby Trig. Political junkies be forewarned: Look out for a tiny flesh-colored earpiece in place during the Biden debate with Steve Schmidt or some other Spawn of the Country Club Jesus feeding her the responses.
– Laugh of the Week: The McCainiacs claiming they won’t make Lady Vain available for open questioning by the BM because US reporters won’t act with the proper ‘respect and deference’ for Alaska’s Beauty Queen Runner-Up. Ha, ha, this is absurd even for Rick Davis – since when did an American politician morph into British royalty? Let’s put on our Rove Smear Cap for a moment: If the Obama camp refused to let Biden be interviewed for the same reason, you just know Karl’s Korps would be endlessly repeating the line: “If he can’t stand up to the media, how’s he going to stand up to Putin?”
– It’s also becoming pretty obvious that we should be calling this the Palin-McCain ticket, as the hapless former Navy Flyboy isn’t the one bringing out the curious crowds on the campaign trail. The wretched McCain just stands there behind her, a blob of aged empty-eyed flesh — occasionally appearing appalled at how low he has sunk, but mostly fidgeting, gaping in senility, and working at maintaining a semblance of a genuine smile. The level of audience interest palpably drops into single-digits when he steps up to speak. It must be galling to McSame that after all these years his fevered presidential aspirations are in the hands of an irritatingly perky nitwit from Alaska and Bush’s Rove-clones who destroyed his presidential campaign in 2000. Wife Cindy must be getting an earful of vicious bile in private.
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