Red Meat Is Bad For You
Anyone wishing to define this year's Presidential campaign in terms of old versus new politics should have a pretty good overview of the subject after Wednesday night's session of the Republican National Convention. With Republican nomination also-rans Rudy "9/11" Giuliani and Mitt Romney setting the stage for the acceptance speech of veep nominee Sarah Palin, Wednesday went down as a red meat feast rivaling those all you can eat South American steak joints. The discerning, however, will note that said meat was carved off the same carcasses the Republican Party has been feeding off of since 1976, and was off color and stank to high heaven.
In short, the evening passed as a textbook example of old political rhetoric, with rows and rows of straw men marching through a rain of unsupported ad hominem attacks, sneering derision and belittlement, and good old bullshit. Miles of bandwidth and oceans of ink have already been devoted today to the ironies of Republicans making speeches in a stadium full of supporters deriding Barack Obama for making speeches in stadiums full of supporters, and the media that were disseminating their messages as they spoke; Republicans stalwartly running against a Washington that they were in full control of for six of the last eight years and a Washington establishment that was largely them; and Sarah Palin exploiting politically the family the McCain campaign accused the Democrats of trying to exploit politically, to name only the highlights-- I'd link you some, but you've already been there.
Instead, I'd like to note that for all the red meat flying around, there was very little beef. Instead of any inkling of what the Republicans would actually do in office, we got the same juvenile rah rah that has reduced our political process to a series of intramural scrimmages on the fields of America High (school colors, jaundice and jade) and the usual Us versus Them rhetoric that somehow never gets around to addressing We, the People.
I am writing this several hours before McCain's acceptance speech and the official end of the convention, but it doesn't really make a damn bit of difference. Anyone who couldn't have listed that speech's highlights several months ago hasn't been paying attention: taxes bad, spending bad, partisanship bad unless its our party, we tough, they pussies, make no mistake my friends, and so on and so on and blah de fucking blah. Any relationship between it and the way McCain and Company would actually govern will be purely coincidental, and any influence it could have on the prospect of McCain and Company actually getting the chance to govern almost too evil to contemplate.
