September 3 RNC Summary
Yes, last night I watched it to see what Palin had to say – a quick summary of the various talking points follows:
- Washington has become a cesspool
- The beltway crowd is calling the shots
- Government is too big
- Government is ineffective
- Special interest groups have been allowed to become too powerful
- Earmarks
- Taxes are too high
- There’s too much pork
— and if America re-elects another Republican administration they’ll fix all that.
There, because Rudy was there and never misses an opportunity, was also the inevitable
- Terrorism !!
- Islamic Terrorism !!
- America’s Enemies !!
- Terrorism !!!!
- Nuclear Weapons !!
- al-Qaeda !!
- Terrorism !!!!!!
Oh yeah, there was also a lot of
- Obama bad
- Biden bad
- liberals bad
- Democrats bad
- media bad
Somehow, despite all of the main talking points, Bush is good – shrug…. you figure it out.
Update: How could I possibly have forgotten that among the talking points we heard
- Ivy League bad
Let me see…….
George W. Bush: Yale
Dick Cheney: Yale (he flunk’d out – so maybe that makes him OK)
It was depressing speech, a reminder that this is a cultural election, not a political one. She’s a mediocre speaker, and she was delivering a series of punchlines and quotable quotes without vision or eloquence – it sounded as though it had been written by a committee of neocon bloggers who contributed a paragraph apiece.
Of course, the target was a Republican cadre that that considers eloquence to be elitist, intelligence to be unnecessary, and vision to be sorta…well, faggy. I used to think that the neocons who’d rhapsodize about Bush’s “simple eloquence” were just kidding themselves – I now understand that that lot has become so tone deaf to actual good writing and speaking that they authentically cannot tell any more.
I’m not sure how empty and rhetoric filled the DNC speeches may have been, I didn’t watch them, but I can imagine…. Palin grabbed my interest as a result of all the left-0-sphere hype surrounding her being chosen by McCain as his VP.
Huge American flags waving on the big screen behind the podium, grainy pictures of McCain after he was subjected to enhanced interrogation methods while the injuries he received when his fighter was shot down were being recounted, and a sun set skyline of New York city when Guilani was speaking — the word cheesy doesn’t quite do it justice.
I thought she was over the top and full of it, though every bit the Republican wet dream – everything from lies about the bridge to nowhere to her utter disrespect for personal liberties and the right to a fair trial – she’s got it all.