Kleveland Klux Konvention

Even before the official festivities got underway, Iowa Congressman Steve ("Mexican drug dealers with calves the size of cantaloupes are coming over the border to kill us and rape us!") King set the white supremacist tone of the four-day-long Hate-a-Thon.

Whenever corporate media pundits need a reliable racist to balance out a panel of smarmy identitarian liberals, they invite somebody like Steve King. (Rudy Giuliani is another ole reliable, but he was busy both on the stage and sitting next to Bob Dole last night.) 

King was asked to guest-star on Chris Hayes's "All In" Konvention show with the almost iron-klad guarantee that he would pleasurably outrage the viewing audience and Quicken their pulses as a warm-up act to Duck Dynasty. Ratings duly skyrocketed as the clip of King spewing white supremacy has gone viral, stunning even fellow guest Charles Pierce, a normally voluble wag, into "jaw-dropping" silence.

So, not wanting to deprive the ratings-needy Chris Hayes of even one more click, I'll post the exchange, too.

Please note that after a faux-shocked Hayes wittily retorts that Hitler and Stalin were white guys too, he then effusively invites this mentally unstable pathocrat back on his show "any time". Anything to make center-right neoliberals seem reasonable and humane.

 But just for now, Hayes has to cut the racism short, because "it's cable." Heh, heh, heh. And now a word from our sponsors (Big Oil, Big Pharma, the "defense" industry, and my own personal favorite, the ad showing a well-to-do retired couple and their leashed pet pig strolling along the seaside to a wealth management appointment at too big to fail JP Morgan Chase.)

Maybe, by the end of the day, the white supremacist dude will even overtake PlagiarGate in total views. But I doubt it. Because the awesome spectacle of Melania Trump copying Michelle Obama's own insipid and probably ghostwritten 2008 convention speech has captured the attention of Kardashian Nation.

My take: The speeches of political wives, unfortunately, are by their very nature interchangeable. These women all come from the same 'umble beginnings, they all worked hard and played by the same hardscrabble rules, they all had strict parents who instilled puritanical values in their children, they all think their hubbies are living saints who care about millions of people they don't know and don't want to know just as much as they care about their own flesh and blood.

The media eats it up. And, of course, the wives' fashion labels are always given at least equal time with their anodyne words. No matter which side of the Money Party they're on, when it comes to media coverage, "who" they are wearing is nearly as important as their teleprompted platitudes.

Before an unemployed blogger/Obama fan caught the plagiarism, Rachel Maddow and her compatriots were full of effusive praise for the adorable Mrs. Trump. Because it is imperative that the corporate media raking in the bucks from this 21st century Nuremberg rally treat it as a genuinely democratic, as well as sane, enterprise. This is despite their frequent wide angle camera shots of the white sea of delegates decked out in their patriotic fright costumes and "Bikers for Trump" regalia.

Luckily for Hillary Clinton, who sent out fund-raising email blasts at the rate of about one per hour during prime time, there is no 1992 Democratic Party convention speech from which to compare notes and play Gotcha. She was deemed too controversial and risky at the time, what with her nationally televised dissing of Tammy Wynette and her aversion to baking cookies.

When 1996 came around, however, Hillary was finally allowed a convention speaking slot. For one thing, she needed to promote her first ghost-written memoir, It Takes a Village. And at the convention, she duly proved that she can be every bit as hackneyed as Melania and Michelle when it comes to folksily pumping up one's spouse:

I wish we could be sitting around a kitchen table, just us, talking about our hopes and fears about our children’s futures. For Bill and me, family has been the center of our lives. But we also know that our family like your family is part of a larger community that can help or hurt our best efforts to raise our child....

  It takes a president who believes not only in the potential of his own child, but of all children, who believes not only in the strength of his own family, but of the American family who believes not only in the promise of each of us as individuals, but in our promise together as a nation.
It takes a president who not only holds these beliefs, but acts on them. It takes Bill Clinton.
Sometimes late at night, when I see Chelsea doing her homework or watching TV or talking to a friend on the phone, I think to myself her life and the lives of millions of boys and girls will be better because of what all of us are doing together.

 But I don't want to take any more time away from the Republicans. So about last night:

The award for best comedy performance by a politician in a fascist setting has been unanimously awarded to Mayor Nine Eleven himself, Rudy Giuliani. ("RooDEE, RooDEE, RooDEE"). Obviously vying with Jersey Boy Chris Christie for the top spot in a Trump Department of Justice, Giuliani promised that Trump would do for America what he did for New York City. Among Rudy's accomplishments were purging 640,000 people from the welfare rolls, instituting racist "broken windows" policing practices, throwing annoying SqueeGee guys off the city streets, and dumping his stunned second wife by way of a televised press conference.

Rudy also claimed that Trump has been a Secret Santa for decades, but that he was hereby breaking his own pledge of silence to Donald about the long unbroken spree of anonymous beneficence. Whereupon Rudy proceeded to immediately break his own promise by maintaining the radio silence after all. Not one folksy anecdote about even one Trumpian good deed was forthcoming.  

But never mind all that. It's Republican awards week, after all.

The  Kanye West award for best oratorium interruptus goes to Donald Trump, for interrupting a couple of konvention speeches from military heroes praising him in order to call in to Fox News to praise himself. He's so vain, he probably thought the show was about him. Oh, wait...

Best special effects: Donald appearing on the stage in blue-misted silhouette. It's a reminder that the opening scene of The Apprentice is probably what we can expect from a Trump presidency: a noxious haze of fear and theatrics.

For double the fun, though, the best improvisational dialogue award has to go to a frothing Rudy playing Adenoid Hynkel. Which means that Donald probably won't pick him to be attorney general after all. Donald hates being upstaged.

Giulani: Are we crazy?

Audience: Yeah!

Ta Ta, Tampa

I am not hung over from the tempest in the tea party pot because I did not indulge in the mendacious merriment. Well, not a lot anyway. I had the equivalent of about half a drink. My daughter and I wasted an hour last night, turning the sound down on the TV, and making up our own dialogue. For example, when Newt and Callista appeared, we had them selling their 498 Regnery books, discussing hairspray and its effect on their brain cells, shilling religious DVDs and autographed pictures, and generally talking dirty. But we turned the volume back up when the Mormon people came on with stories of how Mitt would occasionally deign to visit their relatives in the hospital. Particularly heart-rending was the one about how he helped a dying 16-year-old draft his will so that he could legally leave his gun to his little brother. Another time, he showed up at a congregant's house to help him move, even though he had a broken collarbone and was totally useless. An audience of millions of people were told that the self-effacing Mitt never, ever advertises his good deeds. We learn about them through osmosis. 

Gail Collins of the New York Times quipped that Mitt is the type of annoying neighbor who keeps showing up at your house with unwanted offers of help and all you can think is, My God, now I'm going to have to invite the guy over for dinner.

I finally watched the Clint Eastwood monologue. It's a conversation with an invisible Obama, with a non sequitur about getting out of Afghanistan tomorrow thrown in for good measure. At first you think you're watching an Aricept commercial. Then again, since the whole Republican campaign involves raving about a socialist Obama who unfortunately has never existed in the real world, maybe Clint is just funning with us, performing a parody of the typical Republican senile white guy. Here's the clip in case you're interested.

The much-touted outbreak of anarchy and terrorism in the streets of Tampa did not occur. It was confined to the arena itself. The "I Heart Mitt" signs, the funny hat people, the enraptured faces of the conventioneers, the grimacing Nixon-masked Romney were the real scary deals. Therefore, it was somewhat confusing that the only people ousted were the Code Pink hecklers. It turns out that there were more paramilitary thugs guarding the infrastructure than there were protesters. The looming hurricane reportedly kept the busloads of ordinary human beings away. 

 I am paraphrasing somebody (Dorothy Parker? Molly Ivins?)* when I think I can safely say that the only truthful words spoken during the entire Fellini-esque nightmare were "and" and "the." And even those two are debatable.

*(It was Mary McCarthy dissing Lillian Hellman. Thanks to Robert S. for this link.)