RNC Convention

I have thankfully been very busy this week and have so far missed almost all of the clown circus. I've tried to watch excerpts but it all seems so cynical and so diverged from reality that I can't believe anyone is taking it seriously.

I mean, jail Hillary, seriously? Didn't the justice department just conclude their investigation?

The palpable squirming of all of the speakers in their forced acquiescence to the Trump nomination is amusing, but not enough to make this demonstration of shit hitting the fan entertaining.

Trump says he humbly accepts the nomination for president.

It's a lie.

Trump doesn't know what humility is.

Even for a political convention, this year's RNC rhetoric is glaringly vague. Not a single specific proposal.

Just "Make America Great Again."

Just "Make America Number One."

The Republicans have no agenda, none at all.

I'm shocked!

But Trump is way more trustworthy than Hillary. <facepalm>

I "unfriended" an old friend on Facebook, because I just couldn't take the relentless tide of anti-Hillary postings any more. He says he doesn't like Trump either, and is going to vote libertarian. But where he doesn't like Trump, he rarely posts anything about him, and where he doesn't like Hillary, there are a dozen postings a day about how she lied about Benghazi and it was all her fault, how she was found guilty by the FBI investigation but they decided to give her a pass rather than prosecute her, how she is going to be incredibly dangerous on foreign policy, how she is (any day now) going to be indicted over her emails, etc etc. He has swallowed the Fox News lies whole, while believing that he is appropriately skeptical.

He is intelligent and thoughtful, and (was, anyway) of a philosophical turn of mind. He moved to Anchorage some years ago. I don't know what has happened to him.

Fox Lies are addictive; they're self-reinforcing, they're self-consistent, and they're repeated endlessly. Someone without a strong sense of perspective can be sucked into this whirlpool of deceit so far down that the truth no longer makes sense.

I saw placards at the RNC convention which were, no shit, pretty brilliant.

They misspelled Hillary's name as "HilLIARy."

As Nicolle Wallace pointed out tonight, the DNC convention went out of their way to take the wind out of the expected GOP response.  They dealt with Joe Biden's stuttering, they portrayed Joe and Kamala as coming from modest means and working for everything they've got, they talked about troop safety and national security, they talked about how to grow the economy. 

And the guests who spoke devastated Trump's record in office.

As Nicolle -- a former Republican communications director for W -- said, "What in the world will they have to talk about?"

Here are my predictions for the RNC convention, which starts Monday:

• Speaker after speaker will try to stoke fear of lawless Dems, of burned out cities, of defunded police
  
• Trump himself will mock Biden's stutter
  
• They'll try to make the case for Trump's presidency, but fact-checkers will refute everything
  
• I would not be surprised if tomorrow Friday Barr dropped his long-awaited  Ron Johnson report on Hunter Biden (the one Russian operatives have been feeding him disinformation for), accusing him of using his family connection to get a board position at Burisma Holdings.  The fact-checkers will have a FIELD DAY tearing this apart, since everything has already been investigated, three times, and found innocent -- and the bi-partisan Senate report just explained how this is all Russian propaganda
  
• Nobody will wear masks or social distance.  In 4 weeks - i.e. just before the election -- many COVID hospitalizations will result
  
• The testimonials about Trump will not feature any family members, nor any current or former co-workers, not any employees.  Their opinions would not be favorable
  
• Instead, soulless zombies like Ron Johnson, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Orrin Hatch, Rudy Giuliani, Laura Ingrahm, Sean Hannity, John Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Christie and so forth will sing for their jobs
  
• The Democrats, if they're smart, will do some major counter-programming of their own, handing down indictments against Trump officials and buying fact-checking ads on FNC
  

Quote :

In most places in America, it’s harder to vote than to buy an assault rifle.

We are a nation of questionable priorities.

I like to dream about a world in which the Republicans use their national convention next week to surprise everyone and nominate somebody other than Trump.

But I recognize that’s just a dream.

I expect to hear a lot of thinly-veiled QAnon theories in the convention speeches too.

Quote :

Q has accused many liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking officials of being members of an international child sex trafficking ring. Q also claimed that Trump feigned collusion with Russians to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring and preventing a coup d'état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros.[14][15][16] "Q" is a reference to the Q clearance used by the U.S. Department of Energy. QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto "Where We Go One, We Go All".

NoCoPilot wrote:

• The testimonials about Trump will not feature any family members, nor any current or former co-workers, not any employees.  Their opinions would not be favorable
  

I was wrong.  The speakers are ALL ABOUT Trump's inner family, while none of the Republican establishment wants to stand up with him.

Outer family members?  Maryanne Trump?  Mary Trump?  Not so much.

Well, I tried.

I made it about fifteen minutes into the RNC presentation before the litany of blatant and flagrant falsehoods caused a gag reflex.  MSNBC was trying to display fact-checking messages next to the speeches, and they couldn't even begin to keep up.

It was, to use the phrase, "unmoored from reality."

James Comey on MSNBC beforehand said Trump would pander to his 41% base, and not even attempt to bring anyone else in.  He nailed it.

There was a lot of cocaine at that convention.