RNC Convention Wrapper

The Republican Convention is over. Bush has given his speech, a speech which glossed over important facts and trotted out the compassionate conservatism in time to court women voters just before the election.Yay. Now perhaps the campaigns will get serious? I hope so. The first of four scheduled debates is scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 30. By the way, whatever became of Kerry's challenge to Bush to debate weekly from here on in? Did the Bush campaign just ignore it? Earlier this week, William Saletan wrote a devastating indictment of the Bush Administration the other day for Slate, using VP Cheney's own words against the administration to great effect:

"A senator can be wrong for 20 years without consequence to the nation," said Cheney. "But a president always casts the deciding vote." What America needs in this time of peril, he argued, is "a president we can count on to get it right." You can't make the case against Bush more plainly than that.

He also claims "the case against President Bush is simple":

He sold us his tax cuts as a boon for the economy, but more than three years later, he has driven the economy into the ground. He sold us a war in Iraq as a necessity to protect the United States against weapons of mass destruction, but after spending $200 billion and nearly 1,000 American lives, and after searching the country for more than a year, we've found no such weapons.

Saletan's essay was a response to Zell Miller's vicious speech (and, of course, the subsequent interview w/Chris Matthews in which Zeller effectively challenged Matthews to a duel), which Saletan says was full of charges against Kerry that a are "demonstrably false," and which pointed out that Zeller was saying in no uncertain terms that if you don't agree w/the President on everything you are weakening the country and effectively aiding our enemies. Again, one more simple reason it should be impossible to vote for Bush: His "team" has said again and again and again that dissent is unpatriotic, when dissent is what this country was built upon. (Scott Rosenberg points out much the same thing.) I just heard a Republican spinster on NPR say that if the Democrats can have six months of Howard Dean, the Republicans deserve at least one night of Zell Miller. Whatever. The difference is that Dean was speaking truth to power, while Miller was speaking lies to the powerless, which is probably why the Republicans are now running away from Miller. But while the case against Bush sounds exceedingly simple to me, how it is that half the country is still planning to vote for him? Oh, no need to explain, just watch The Daily Show, which had a terrific piece Wednesday night about how Bush "has used the power of words to overcome insurmountable facts."

Don't listen to the filter or the facts, listen to the Words. George W. Bush: Because he says so.

In other "highlights" related to the RNC "Con": Michael Moore praised the Bush daughters as an example of how children can please parents, then he says don't send more kids to die. Other people aren't so happy with the Bush twins. Half of New Yorkers Believe US Leaders Had Foreknowledge of Impending 9-11 Attacks and “Consciously Failed” To Act; 66% Call For New Probe of Unanswered Questions by Congress or New York’s Attorney General, New Zogby International Poll Reveals. Salon says the Republicans never "let the facts get in the way of their partisan ferocity." A Columbus, Montana swift boat veteran is angry that the Swift Boat Veterans for Rewriting History (er, I mean, "Truth") used his name w/out his permission:

"I'm pretty nonpolitical," the 56-year-old [Bob] Anderson said Tuesday. So, when he found out last week that his name was one of about 300 signed on a letter questioning Kerry's service, he was "flabbergasted." "It's kind of like stealing my identity," said Anderson, who spent a year on a swift boat as an engine man and gunner.

And so the circus continues... UPDATE: No wrap-up of the RNC convention would be complete w/out at least some mention of the huge protests that marked the week, as well as the violations of civil liberties that caused a judge to order "the release of hundreds of Bush protesters Thursday, ruling that police held them illegally without charges for more than 40 hours":

Hours before President Bush made his speech to the Republican National Convention, Manhattan Criminal Court Judge John Cataldo held city officials in contempt of court for failing to release more than 500 detained demonstrators by 5 p.m. The judge said that the detentions violated state law, and he threatened to impose a fine of $1,000 per day for each person kept in custody longer than 24 hours without being arraigned.

The irony here is that any money the city pays in fines comes from where? The taxpayers who were jailed and whose rights were violated. I've got a better idea: Instead of handing out fines, how about we throw the police in jail and hold them under the same conditions the protesters were held under, and for the same length of time, plus a little for good measure. The NY Chief of Police should join them. That would give these fine officers a chance to really think about civil liberties and why they should take them more seriously. Also: Why Democrats shouldn't be scared, by Michael Moore

Posted September 3, 2004 04:48 PM | election 2004