my RNC blogging

I've just turned on PBS to watch the convention. Dennis Hastert is trashing John Kerry, and looks like he's sweating like a pig. Ooh! There's the Bush daughters! They are much foxier than the Kerry daughters if you ask me.
Hmm...doesn't seem like the crowd was all that into his speech.

Dick Cheney, the focus of all the evil in the modern world, has just arrived.

Wait! Did I just see black people there?!?!? And was Ray Suarez just interviewing a Latino delegate? Didn't Andrew Kohl from the Pew Center just tell us all Republicans are rich and white?!?!?! Does not compute...

Whoa! Hey! That guy was from The West Wing! At the Republican National Convention! Amazing! Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman on TWW) is a committed partisan Democrat, and an influential fundraiser in Hollywood. Creator Aaron Sorkin is a Democrat, as is (obviously) Martin Sheen, and even the guy who plays Toby. I think he spoke at the convention.

Blah blah blah. Oh, this interesting. Monkeys like to smoke! And they have nic fits, I guess.

Ok, there's some shitty music..some cool tanks and planes and stuff....man, that is an ugly choir...Ok, now they're talking about whether or not the GOP is "exploiting" 9/11 by holding their convention in NYC. To exploit something, one would necessarily need to gain something from its use. In this case, the assumed gain would be political. By reminding the country of 9/11, the thinking goes, the GOP will reap political gain. How? I don't understand how, by going into a city that's enormously hostile to Republicans and risking the impression that they are exploiting 9/11, which would presumably carry a huge backlash from Republicans as well as Democrats, they are expected to gain anything? It seems to me that it would be more exploitative, that is, they would reap more gain, by having their convention in somewhere like Salt Lake City. I mean, seriously, if you're gonna exploit 9/11, exploit the shit out of it.

"I come to tell you: Iraq enjoys a new day." --Zainab Al-Suwaij Executive Director, American Islamic Congress. She's from Iraq, homes.

"Only the most deluded among us could doubt the necessity of this war." --Sen. John McCain

(As McCain gets a huge cheer from the assembled for insisting that we have the right to expect other nations to aid us in our struggle)
What's great about conventions is that its the one time in four years that you get to hear a variety of our nation's best and brightest speaking their minds, uninterrupted and unedited by news organizations. They should do these every year.

And how fucking sweet was it to see John McCain call out Michael Moore's fat ass! Twice! And the crowd goes wild! But can someone explain to me how the fuck MM got in there anyway? Do we really want to trust our national security to people who can't even keep MM out of the Republican National Convention!?!??!! Seriously guys: WTF.

The bit:

"After years of failed diplomacy and limited military pressure to restrain Saddam Hussein, President Bush made the difficult decision to liberate Iraq.

Those who criticize that decision would have us believe that the choice was between a status quo that was well enough left alone and war. But there was no status quo to be left alone.

The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close. The international consensus that he be kept isolated and unarmed had eroded to the point that many critics of military action had decided the time had come again to do business with Saddam, despite his near daily attacks on our pilots, and his refusal, until his last day in power, to allow the unrestricted inspection of his arsenal.

Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our critics abroad. Not our political opponents.

And certainly not a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls."

Ouch.

Rudy Giuliani seems like he's having fun. He looks natural. Too bad he wasting so much of his speech trashing John Kerry. Don't get me wrong, he's good at it. I just wish he didn't have to do it in primetime, when the GOP is supposed to be putting its best face forward. Let's not stoop to bashing, shall we?

A video of Frank Sinatra? Lame. Terribly, terribly lame. Way to draw in the young voters, guys. They couldn't even get someone to cover the song? Sing it in person? Monumentally lame. Remarkably, historically, unfathomably lame. I'm going to bed.