I caught a bit of Chris Christie’s speech last night and savored the irony of Mr. 26 percent — that’s the percentage of New Jersey registered voters who still think Christie is doing a good job — calling Hillary Clinton “incompetent.”
It occurs to me that both parties are primarily running on scaring the bejeezus out of the voters. Vote for X, because Y will bring about the Apocalypse. But, true to form, the Right is threatening more violence. Josh Marshall:
As we’ve discussed, it’s not normal for one nominee and his convention delegates to be chanting for the opposing party nominee to be put in prison. I felt a bit silly writing that because that is extremely obvious. But it’s not some silly novelty. You go from opposition, to demands for imprisonment and finally for murder. We saw that case with the state rep down in West Virginia. Now we have a Trump delegate and advisor saying Clinton should be “shot for treason.” This kind of incitement is poisonous to the political process and civic life generally. And let’s be honest, it can have horrific consequences. This has the feeling of the crazy talk that was circulating about President Kennedy before November 1963.
And then there’s this:
According to xHamster, one of the leading aggregators of online porn, traffic from users in Cleveland spiked significantly this week as the Republican National Convention got underway. Viewership in the city shot up by 184 percent from its pre-convention average, surpassing traffic the site gets from people in large cities including New York, Miami and Los Angeles.
“This increase is unprecedented,†said Mike Kulich, a spokesman for the web site. “They’re making porn great again.â€
Since the GOP platform declares that porn is a public health menace, perhaps they were doing research.
Although it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Clint Eastwood and the Chair, Melania Trump’s partly plagiarized speech has gotten more media attention than whatever it was Chris Christie said last night. The Trump campaign has offered up a number of excuses, until today when a staffer fell on her sword and took the blame. But the damage was done.
Across the country, slack-jawed Republican political operatives and speechwriters expressed expletive-laden bewilderment at the organizational breakdown allowing such an episode to occur.
“It’s like some guy trying to paddle across a river in a rowboat who shoots a hole in his boat,†said Stuart Stevens, who wrote speeches for Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, throughout the 2012 campaign.
In interviews, alarmed Republican speechwriters outlined the layers of formal scrutiny, apparently disregarded by the Trump campaign, traditionally applied to almost every draft of a major convention address. They described word-by-word fact-checking by a dedicated team of experts and computer software designed to catch plagiarism. Several online programs, like DupliChecker, are available at no cost.
The Trump family: Making Derp Great Again.
I wonder if there’s a p*rn movie titled “Derp Throat?”
It would have to be about a billionaire with a bevy of models ready to service his every whim. oh, and sycophantic politicians, too., who he’d beaten to get to run for POTUS.
Nah.
No one would swallow such a movie script! that farfetched
This GOP convention looks like a mob scene from a horror movie.
Only, this mob loves and supports its monster, and wants it to kill the people in the other village!
And will cheer and do whatever the mob can do, to make that happen.
If Melania hadn’t lied about writing her own speech, I might – even would, probably – feel sorry for her.
But she didn’t, did she?
My guess is a speech writer did write her a speech, but the Dumb-‘n-old decided to doctor it. The most embarassing thing, is that it was stolen from the hated Michelle Obama.
What a putz!
Nothing new here.
Hell, he organized for his ‘tRUMP You-never-see- it-y’ – your money again – to plagiarize the “books” and ‘manuals” for his real estate grift.
But this mob loves it’s monster!
Hear it Bore!!!
No, no, you do not get it. Last night was all about Make America Work Again. You lock up Hillary Clinton, and Youngstown, Ohio, will be an industrial powerhouse again. Simple as that. Put her in an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison, and the blast furnaces of the steel mills will fire right up. Jeez, why do I always have to explain these things?
I could not quite relate to the plagiarism kerfuffle. How can you plagiarize a bunch of banalities?
Ed,
Because those banalites are smarter and more poignant than her own banalities?
“Put her in an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison,” I guess orange is the new black.
Trump family: putting the “con” back in convention since 2016.
Here I am, aching for the poor delegates, far from home and family, reduced to having to watch pron to keep themselves pure for their spouses. Great souls, great souls, all.
@ c u n d
“This GOP convention looks like a mob scene from a horror movie.”
I’ve quoted this elsewhere, but can’t resist it here. Tom Levenson at the Inverse Square blog, describes it thus
“…the home-video version of Triumph of the Will we’re all seeing in Cleveland this week.”
Today is the last day of the 96-hour long “Two-Minute Hate.”
It can’t end fast enough for me!
Not that I’ve watched a second of it, but I’ve been reading the updates until late at night.
And it’s scaring The bejuzus out of me. All of the creepy crawlies have come out from under their rocks and rotting logs to terrorize poor Cleveland, and a national TV audience.
Will Cleveland now be the new Love Canal clean-up site?
Imo – trump knew, and let Cruz go on for the drama. I think the booing was orchestrated. After all, it started with the NY delegation, as Cruz said, ‘vote your conscience’ – kind of ironic from a man with none, non-endorsing one with a minus-conscience.
This 96-hour long “Two Minute Hate” is not a traditional political convention. It’s more like, “Wrestlemania: GOP Convention Boogaloo!”
There were fog-effects, chants, etc.
Hell, the only thing that was missing was people hitting one another over the head with chairs. Or, maybe that happened, and I didn’t read about it.
There was even a possible Nazi salute, from that hate-talk-radio twit, Laura Ingraham.
C u n d gulag, I hesitate to be petty, but Laura Ingraham is properly referred to at princess, not twit. When Ann Coulter dies or abdicates her throne as the queen of the right wing hate hags, Laura will assume the throne. It was Ann who first backed the Herr Peculiar, and would have probably been chosen to speak over Laura but her credentials are a bit too well known.
I recall the days of Papa Bush, when the camera caught Rush Limbaugh in the audience and this received notice by the announcing press. Oh for when America was truly great and it was a perceived embarrassment that a radio talk show host was even allowed into the convention hall as a guest. How times have changed.
Now they come right to the podium, speak, salute/wave, and no one seems a bit embarrassed.
bernie,
Conservatives lost the ability to be embarrassed quite a while ago.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a46695/donald-trump-candidacy-american-democracy/
As much as I dislike Cruz, I have say he’s the only one who showed a backbone. I watched the video of Marco Rubio rolling over and sucking up to Trump voluntarily in the manner of someone you would expect of being coerced. His political ambition is his tormentor.
It puzzles me to understand how anybody could toss aside their dignity, their principles, or any remnants of character they might possess just to further their political ambitions.
Maybe it’s just me clinging to some archaic sense of value and worth in what constitutes that of being a man, but I couldn’t grovel like Marco did just for the sake my ambitions and especially before a man who thoroughly and publicly humiliated me like Trump did to Marco. What’s this country coming to?
Look at it this way: The RNC has given the Democrats a gift this week. I wonder if they will recognize and use it.
Those chants of “Lock her up, lock her up” that we all heard repeatedly from the floor are a form of pure political gold. Here is what I would expect to hear next week from one of the keynote speakers. If they don’t use it in some form, they don’t deserve to win:
Keynote speaker: “You know, we Democrats really don’t cherish the idea of locking up our political opponents. We cherish their freedom and will fight to defend it. We just don’t want them to be in charge.
We don’t want Donald Trump to be all cooped up in that tiny little Oval Office. We want to set him free.”
Crowd chants: SET HIM FREE, SET HIM FREE, SET HIM FREE!
Keynote speaker: “We don’t want him stuck in some boring and tedious meeting with a bunch of senior White House staff morning after morning. We want to set him free.”
Crowd chants: SET HIM FREE, SET HIM FREE, SET HIM FREE!
Keynote speaker: We don’t want him to have to endure a lot of dull and tiresome briefings on the details of foreign or domestic policy. We want to set him free.
Crowd chants: SET HIM FREE, SET HIM FREE, SET HIM FREE!
Knowing the Democrats, they will drop the ball on this. But there is always a chance that they won’t.
Ah, Swami, ’twas ever thus. Read your Mencken.
I managed to avoid the RNC almost completely. I had one lapse; in between innings (Red-Sox/Giants), I switched (radio) stations to NPR, forgetting that they were covering the convention. The speaker (still don’t know who) shouted:
“…We’re gonna wipe the United States off the face of the Earth!”
…and the crowd erupted with applause.
Why do they hate America???
“and I alone can fix it.”
Seems Trumps thinks very highly of himself.