Thursday, September 02, 2004

RNC Wednesday

I don't know about you, but I prefer Washington Post's Tom Shales' take on the RNC with my morning cup of coffee:

At their convention in New York last night, the Republicans went bipolar on us. With coverage limited to a tight and tidy hour, the time was basically divided between two speakers with wildly contrasting styles: Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), a turncoat who did a whoop-and-holler assault on the Democratic opposition candidates, and Vice President Cheney, a shoo-in for a second nomination and not in the least worried about it.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, two very different men could speak in succession, but the crowd was the same for both, and to a large degree, the Republicans behaved like a bunch of yahoos who'd been bused in expecting "The Jerry Springer Show." Nothing makes a worse case for the Republican Party than seeing a mob of them congregating.

This crowd makes your average suburban tailgate party look like a black-tie State Dinner.

Or this from Andrew Sullivan:
THE MILLER MOMENT: Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes. His speech tonight was in this vein, a classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric. As an immigrant to this country and as someone who has been to many Southern states and enjoyed astonishing hospitality and warmth and sophistication, I long dismissed some of the Northern stereotypes about the South. But Miller did his best to revive them. The man's speech was not merely crude; it added whole universes to the word crude.

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