CSotD: Putting the Con in Convention
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Okay, I’ve got more to say, but Tom the Dancing Bug certainly did a lot of the heavy lifting, and I’d note his inclusion of a “temperature lowerer,” which suggests that this is a post-assassination-attempt effort or at least that Bolling added an edit before release.
Still, much of this was predictable and he does a nice job of rounding up what we’ve since seen take place in Milwaukee.
That’s not a case of damning with faint praise: There is a great deal of value in stating the obvious when the obvious seems to be getting past so many people. We keep hitting points where it’s reasonable to expect some mass revelation to take hold and yet it doesn’t.
Several people on social media have made the connection between Hulk Hogan’s flamboyant speech last night and the blustering, gun-toting President in Idiocracy, but, given that the entire audience in Milwaukee did not burst into laughter and begin throwing things, it’s clear that, hilarious as you may have found that movie, Mike Judge & Company hit the nail on the head.
The important part being that Hogan knows professional wrestling is fixed, but either a very large percentage of his fan base does not, or they believe that everything is fixed, which is worse, because it fits so well with the notion that, despite the massive proof that the 2020 election was fair and the absurdity of the accusations that it was fixed, they take it all in as part of a worldview in which fact and fiction are subjective distinctions.
Juxtaposition of the Day
In a world of subjective reality, or, in Kellyanne Conway’s actual words, “alternative facts,” the shifting opinions and fungible loyalties of political leaders are perfectly acceptable. Slyngstad portrays them as betraying the stated values of the party, but Whamond reduces them to comical flip-floppers.
Some of us remember when John Kerry’s presidential campaign was heavily damaged with charges of flip-flopping, but in Trumpworld, it’s no different than Donald Sutherland being a semi-retarded, funny GI in “The Dirty Dozen,” a brilliant crook in “the Great Train Robbery” and an outright villain in “the Hunger Games.”
After all, Hulk Hogan is really Terry Bollea. They’re all actors, playing roles to entertain us.
Are we not entertained?
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
It’s no secret that JD Vance referred to Trump as an American Hitler, but that was then and this is now and he’s no longer playing the Hillbilly Elegist, unless the team decides once more to promise coal mining jobs, in which case, he’ll put on his overalls and pick up a banjo.
Bear in mind that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton promised people in coal country she’d help them retrain for good jobs in growing fields, while Trump promised more coal-mining jobs. He won and the jobs didn’t appear.
Last night he blamed immigrants for — I kid you not — taking more jobs than exist:
By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs? The jobs that are created? 107% of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens. And you know who’s being hurt most by millions of people pouring into our country? The Black population and the Hispanic population, because they’re taking the jobs from our Black population, our Hispanic population.
But the fellow who isn’t at all an American Hitler has a plan to round up 20 million immigrants — including many with legal status and even citizenship — put them in concentration camps and then deport them. As Lalo Alcaraz (AMS) notes, the convention hall was filled with posters enthusiastically calling for Mass Deportation Now.
Trump also promised to bring down grocery prices, which will be quite a challenge once he’s sealed the border and made sure nobody is available to work in the fields and meat-packing plants.
I hope Latino voters were paying attention, because he’s also looking for ways to strip their American-born children of their citizenship despite the protection of the 14th Amendment. And he’s got just the Supreme Court to do it.
I should confess that I didn’t stay up to listen to Trump’s acceptance speech, though I read a number of reports about it this morning and I don’t think I missed a whole lot, or, at least, a whole lot that would have kept me from getting my sleep anyway.
Nate Silver offered this on-going commentary:
Darrin Bell (KFS) offered this translation of Trump’s version of what happened on Saturday and why. As noted before, an assassin who might have been dismissed as insane a generation ago is seen, at least in Milwaukee, as both a tool of the opposition and a chance for God to intervene for his favorite.
What I gather from more complete reporting is that he, unsurprisingly, departed from his prepared speech and launched off into his favorite digressions and even those attempting to cover things with journalistic formality were hard-pressed to keep up.
However, his acolytes have long since learned not to fret over his mangling of names and his recitation of alternative facts, alternative history and alternative logic. It’s only a role and actors often improvise.
It’s not as if he were a Democrat running for the office, which demands more verbal perfection.
Biden’s opponents — not the ones in Milwaukee, the other ones — are becoming more outspoken and determined to get him to quit the race, and, as Clay Bennett (CTFP) points out, his recent covid diagnosis seems an opportunity to pause and recalculate.
As noted here several times, I wanted Biden to be a one-and-done president, and think he’s done an excellent job of cleaning up the mess he inherited.
But Walt Handelsman didn’t have to reach for a unique metaphor to comment on a matter which may require a mid-stream change of horses.
He did well to put a donkey’s head on that trickster, because, for all that progressives may denounce the influence of money in politics, it’s hard to tell where megadonors leave off and party leadership begins, a challenge which assumes they’re distinct to begin with.
Are the new, louder public voices from more influential party figures based on time ticking away or money fading away?
And are those factors distinct, either?
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