RUTHFULLY YOURS

I almost gave tonight’s DNC performance a miss. How could they top the fey chap pretending to be a bat while miming to a poor rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ as a collage of kneeling athletes in ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-Shirts flitted by behind him? It was…special.

I’d say that the chap who tweeted that it was ‘the moment Trump won reelection’ was right, except that there have been so many such moments: positive ones like President Trump’s magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore last month, as well as negative ones like the Biden campaign’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate. One wag said that that decision was a huge in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That sounds right to me.

I want to minute another perspicacious tweet about the mincing batman-For-What-It’s-Worth performance from my friend Roger L. Simon: ‘Stop, hey, what’s that sound…of the Democratic party’s brains falling out of their heads.’ Anyway, I looked it up: the bat fellow with the PoMo Liberace bat duds is called Billy Porter and the geezer playing the guitar was…Stephen Stills. Wow. Nearly 60 years ago he wrote that anti-war anthem. And here he was again, still. Old rockers never die: they just refuse to fade away.

Let’s admit frankly that the DNC was laboring under extraordinary duress. No, I am not thinking of the fact that their nominee is a senile basement dweller who cannot put two sentences together. That is a liability, true, but it is self-chosen. I am thinking rather of the pressure of coronavirus hysteria, which has shut down most of the country and certainly shut down the conventions of both parties. It will be interesting to see if the RNC handles things any better from a technical point of view. I hope they forgo the Zoom clips of people at home clapping: they are just pathetic.

Anyway, organizing a virtual event is a challenge, not to say an exercise in surrealistic self-expression. At least the DNC has the advantage of having a virtual candidate to go along with their virtual campaign. It adds a certain symmetry to the performance. I don’t know anyone — left, right, woke or based — who thinks that Joe Biden, were he elected, would actually serve out his term. That in itself infused an air of unreality into the whole proceeding. Oh my gosh, John Kasich, who once upon a time was a Republican, gave an anti-Trump speech for the convention. So did Colin Powell, who had done the same for Obama (twice) and Hillary last time around. Was that supposed to set anyone’s heart going pit-a-pat?

Here’s an honest question: do they want to lose? I asked myself that once again with the kick-off tonight — not ‘Actress and Convention Moderator’ Kerry Washington’s silly comments about the Constitution of the United States but rather the long opening segment attacking the Second Amendment. They even drafted in Gabby Giffords, and it was so unfair! Since the ‘event’ was virtual, they couldn’t even supply an air sickness bag. Unfair! Do they have any idea how many people are avid supporters of the Second Amendment?

Apart from wanting to disarm you, what are the major Dem issues? Actress and Convention Moderator Kerry Washington listed them: the Chinese virus (she didn’t say that of course, rather she said ‘COVID’), ‘systemic racism’, police violence, the ‘trans community’, and — lest you forget — climate hysteria — I mean ‘change’. The little clip about that was really special, too. I wonder whether donating to the DNC gets you a key-chain that will play the theme from The Twilight Zone when you press a button? They need that. They need one that goes to 11 so people can play it at top volume when that freak Billie Eilish comes on to tell you to Vote Joe and then sings you a little song.

Actress and Con. Mod. Kerry Washington then went on about how diverse the Black community is — but wait, didn’t her man Joe say that it was not diverse as the Hispanic community is? Well, yes, but that was a whole week ago.

I wonder what the viewership of this dog’s breakfast is? For the Democrats’s sake, I hope it is low. It will not convince anyone who is not already convinced. The truth is, this was mostly not a convention, but a series of political ads. The Dems are against your Second Amendment rights and for the Green New Deal (which means they are against America’s energy independence). They are for open borders, higher taxes, Black Lives Matter brutes and urban squalor (they do not use the word ‘squalor’). Also, how many Americans want to watch Prince Royce sing ‘Stand By Me’?

But be still my heart: we are just about to hear about women! We haven’t heard enough about women in our society lately. Thank God, the DNC has the courage to put women in the limelight. It is such a neglected subject. At last, we’ll get to hear about what women think and feel, how unfair life, especially life in the US, has been for women, and how voting for Joe Biden can help women, especially those who use nice-smelling shampoo. Women talking to women about women: we need more of it.

Once again, though, I wonder whether the DNC has a mole, someone burrowed deep into the party, to subvert it. Why else would they air a truly repellent clip of the party’s most obnoxious women saying such obnoxious things? And why would they air that truly mendacious clip from the distaff ghoul-in-chief, Hillary Clinton? Fairness, however, requires that I acknowledge that Hillary did have one of the very best lines of the evening: she actually described, with a straight face, Kamala Harris as ‘kind’. Yes, really: ‘kind’.

Nancy Pelosi has a nice new hairdo. It went along well with her telling us that she likes killing unborn children, et cetera, et cetera, and thinks — or says she thinks — that Joe Biden’s faith in God gives him the strength to lead, et cetera, et cetera.

Trying putting those two phrases together ‘Joe Biden’ and ‘faith in God’. How’s it working out for you?

But let’s go back to Kamala Harris. (Have you stepped out to get that airsickness bag yet?) I do think that she should have more respect for her mother. In her prepared remarks, Harris insisted that she was ‘committed to the values she [my mother] taught me, to the word that teaches me to walk by faith, and not by sight.’ Let’s follow Harris own example and leave religion out of the equation. Does anyone really think that Kamala Harris’s mother would approve of her 29-year-old daughter essentially prostituting herself to the married 60-year-old Willie Brown, the speaker of the California State Assembly, in order to jump-start her career (and her bank account: Brown gave her a BMW and arranged for her to get paid $99,000 for attending a twice monthly meeting)?

Squaw Elizabeth Warren had a nice red jacket. She drank no beer tonight. She told us that ‘big problems need big solutions’ — like canceling student debt and making bankruptcy laws ‘work for families, instead of the creditors who try to cheat them.’ She whined a little about how hard it is for women who have children and also work. Why wasn’t there someone else to take care of her children? Last week I said that Kamala Harris was the nastiest women in politics. Elizabeth Warren really does give her a run for her money.

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Barack Obama’s comments, unlike Harris’s, left out his mother but did contain some real gems (and it was by far the best rhetorical performance of the evening: the man can really read a teleprompter). I particularly liked this: Trump, quoth Obama, has shown ‘no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.’

‘Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.’

Many previous speakers echoed these sentiments. But is there any sentient person who does not recognize how mendacious this little litany is? Those 170,000 dead from our latest Chinese important have nothing to do with Donald Trump’s policies. Indeed, he has handled the COVID crisis adroitly, and the rising stock market and falling unemployment rate show that his economic leadership continues to bear fruit. The United States was the laughing stock of the world under Barack Obama. Donald Trump has reversed all that and is well on his way to ‘making America great again’. Obama talks about ‘our democratic institutions’ being ‘threatened like never before’. The irony, of course, is that Barack Obama is deeply complicit in the biggest threat to American democracy in the history of the republic — the concerted deep-state effort, aided and abetted by his administration, to disrupt the results of a free open and democratic election. They will try it again in 2020. The amateur hour performance we have seen these last few days gives me hope that they will not succeed.