The reviews of the first night of the RNC convention are in and they’re not pretty, friends, not pretty at all.
Yes, the Republicans have had a grip on our junk for the last four years and yet it’s the Democrats who are at fault for all the bad things that are happening. You’ve got to wonder why the party that claims to be full of tough guys and projects strength as the most important virtue could be so lame at running a country.
The best review I’ve read so far is Robin Givhan’s at WaPo. Her review focused on the style elements of the RNC convention presentations and speakers. She starts with a critique of both parties’ role calls that looked like this:
It was Trumpian politics as television. And it was dismal.
Each state’s chairman or representative appeared in front of the same bland backdrop decorated with the hashtag #RNC2020. The camera’s framing trapped each speaker in an uninspiring rectangle. The only reminder that the Republicans were live from a Charlotte ballroom were the disembodied cheers that would periodically erupt in the background — perfunctory, desperate noise from a greatly reduced throng.
The view of each speaker’s face was so uncomfortably intimate that you could see the perspiration shining on one forehead after another. You could tell how close people shave and how diligently they floss. And frankly, it just seemed to be a cruel and unnecessary act to put these civics die-hards under such a high-definition microscope.
But then, the longer the roll call ticked on, the more you realized that the Republicans had no interest in putting a gloss on their proceedings. They were reveling in the sweaty urgency of their law-and-order, build-a-wall, liberty-and-justice-for-me message. It was just fine that man after man after man after man felt very comfortable expounding on the sanctity of a fetus without mentioning the well-being and autonomy of the woman who carries it.
Other than that, it was American Carnage, the Sequel and the dawning realization that they’ve done nothing to make things better in four years. If anything, the protests, unemployment, growing desperation, and persistent plague they have allowed to flourish on their watch have only made things worse. It’s hard to believe any organization would take pride in screwing things up this badly and then offer nothing but barricading Americans in their homes with guns and prayers as the remedy.
That’s all you got??
It’s like the boggart scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The boggart emerges from its wardrobe but instead of making the fear and panic ridiculous, Republicans turn it into the creature from Alien, complete with oozing socialism and black skin armor.
This was the chaos and dark that Biden referred to last week. It’s a cacophony of fear, confusion, lies, projection and anxiety. If it’s so bad out there, why didn’t Republicans do something about it? They’ve had the time and money. Lots of money.
Oh, also, black people and forward thinking people who want to get s}#% done are the enemies.
Yeah, “Ridiculous!”
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Here’s a curiosity:
I listen to news on the TuneIn app on my iPhone. For about a month, there was a constant barrage of Trump ads. The most played one was the voice mailbox of the local police station. If you haven’t heard it, it’s all about YOUR emergency and the police department getting back to you in a week.
But in the last two weeks , they’ve all disappeared and I’ve heard nothing but Biden ads. I don’t know what to attribute that to. Does TuneIn target ads to listeners based on locale? If so, is Trump giving up on Western PA? Or PA in general? Is it a national phenomenon? Do they just not have enough money? Are they saving it for more annoying ads as we get closer to the election?
Anybody know? I’m not complaining. The Trump ads were irritating AF and the TuneIn streaming app is the only place I’ve been subjected to political ads from either side. I’d like to keep it that way. (No, I’m not going premium. I don’t have endless money for a zillion sunscriptions)
But the complete absence of Trump ads after weeks and weeks of that annoying Police ad is … weird.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Unfortunately, there are Trump ads and videos blanketing YouTube from the moment you look at the site.
I thought that your essay below about how there has been a massive brainwashing campaign to get people to reflexively hate anything Democrat or liberal, was absolutely accurately perceived. No matter what Trump does or doesn’t do, his people will accept any of it, as long as those awful “libs” do not win. i’m surprised that someone hasn’t gone through all of Goebbels and Hitler’s speeches, to find the antecedents to what the Republicans are trying to brainwash people with.. And we can think of the novel “1984,’ with the Two Minutes of Hate each day, and the probably invented rebel leader whose destruction must be the focus of the citizens.
Yes, the logic of this is ludicrous; that somehow Trump should be rewarded for all the deaths, all the unemployment, depleted bank accounts, people who don’t have health care; and that if Biden is elected, we will have….more of it? We will go back to the chaos and carnage of the Obama years? Tim Scott said that if Biden would be elected, it would be a “Socialist utopia.’ Well, vocabulary is not their strong point. Whatever is going on now, will be so much worse if you elect somebody whom the Left wing of the Democratic Party has disliked for decades; the Senator who sponsored the Crime Bill of 1994?. The terrifying thing is that propaganda works, particularly when you have psychologically based algorithms employed by the firms who are fed the personal data collected from Facebook. The totalitarians in Orwell’s novel knew each person’s greatest fear.
The 2016 Republican Convention, from what i read about it was similar..America is a chamber of horrors, cities have been destroyed, the economy is terrible, they are going to take away your guns, listen to what Scott Baio has to say. Yet they somehow won, one way or another. The sad truth is that there are millions of Americans who do not reason logically, who respond to hate and fear, who have been taught to despise the hobgoblin of the liberal hordes. Hopefully, there are still enough who do not respond to this. i saw a few minutes of the post-day wrap up on MSNBC, and O’Donnell said that the only mention at the convention of any actual policy proposal, was Trump, Jr. saying that his father would get rid of the payroll tax, which in reality would cause the entire Social Security Fund to disappear by 2023, meaning no one would get one cent of Social Security payments after that date. i would like to see Democrats use some of the $70 million of donations they got last week, to run ad after ad just focusing on that. That is the actual horror show stuff which people are being misdirected away from.
We still have 10 weeks to go, and the Treason Party is supreme at lying and cheating, but still, this is encouraging:
https://electoral-vote.com/
Texas and NC just swung back to Biden. The mere fact that Texas has become a swing state is faboo. 🙂
Trump is still running ads on the local Philly CBS affiliate. They are just as dumb as the 911 ad. It show Biden from his first run for the nomination and ends with ‘unsuitable then, unsuitable now’. The Trump ads are worthy of someone running for 8th grade class president, they are juvenile.