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Monday, September 06, 2004

The most trusted name in news analysis

It looks like my Republican National Convention blogging was a huge success!  I’m not talking about the numbers of new readers it brought to this site—although I’m really glad to have you.  No, I’m referring to the fact that my account of the Convention has become this week’s Conventional Wisdom.  That’s right, folks, the Bush Bounce started right here!

Look for example at the latest column by the Dean of Conventional Wisdom, David Broder himself.  “On the first three nights of the convention, the major speakers had sliced and diced Democratic nominee John Kerry but otherwise had been stuck on a single note: the threat of terrorism.” Right-O!  And who had the most convincing, compelling account of the slicing and dicing?  Why, I did!  While everyone else was mewling and whimpering, “um, John Kerry didn’t really vote against those weapons systems” and “oh, oh, I don’t think he ever said he’d give the United Nations veto power over U.S. military actions” and “it’s not quite true, in a philosophical sense, that he ever claimed that the U.S. was engaged in an illegal occupation of Iraq,” blah blah blah, hello liberal quibblers, like anyone’s even listening to you, this blog performed the crucial public service of taking every single GOP claim at face value, the way our media should do.  Did I make mistakes?  Yes, yes I did.  In my haste to wrap up my accounts of the convention by 3 am each morning, I forgot to urge you all to thrill to the story of how Arnold Schwarzenegger, armed only with a pair of 150-pound dumbbells, managed to fight off the Soviet tanks that tried to crush his homeland during the dark Vienna Spring of 1968—finally escaping to the United States where he heard Hubert Humphrey saying that he supported the Soviet invasion of Austria!  No wonder Nixon was a breath of fresh air.  My bad, folks!

More interestingly still, alert reader Al Lert has alerted me to the fact that my blogging of the RNC was almost identical to that of novelist/screenwriter/ blogger Roger L. Simon.  Check it out!  It’s just too uncanny to be true!!

On the honor and dignity that is Ed Koch:

Me:  For a quarter century, the name “Ed Koch” has been synonymous with integrity and rectitude—he’s a beacon of sanity and light in dark times.  If he says George Bush is our man, I think Democrats should sit up straight and listen.

And Roger Simon:

Koch is my man. He is pro War on Terror and pro same sex marriage. He is a moral man of guts who, as a lifetime Democrat, was willing to speak in favor of Bush.

On the warm and fuzzy feelings of that first moderate and tolerant inclusive compassionate night:

Me:  These people really seem very nice, once you get to meet them. They’re not wild-eyed ideologues—they’re just ordinary folks, sitting there in Madison Square Garden, trying to have a good time. They’re as sensible as you or your grandmother, and all they want is for people to love one another, inclusively, in a big tent that is inclusive.

And Roger Simon:

Listening to Giuliani and McCain last night, I was starting to think, well, this Republican thing ain’t so bad.  Just like when I listen to Lieberman or Evan Bayh I think the same thing about Democrats—hey, these folks make sense.

On Zell Miller, the last honest Democrat in America:

Me:  The Zellraiser started off on fire: “Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?” he asked. Our nation is being torn apart by Democrats and their obsession to bring down our Commander-in-Chief! And that, my friends, is why we cannot unite the country the way we so desperately want to: these goddamn Democrats are a bunch of soft-bellied traitors! They insist on seeing American soldiers as occupiers, not liberators, when in fact, as Zell pointed out, the soldier, not the reporter, has given us the freedom of the press. Many cheers for this line from the crowd below me in the Garden! Screw those reporters who abuse the freedom of the press! Just like the soldier, not the agitator, has given us freedom of expression. Damn to hell fire those protestors who abuse the privilege of freedom of speech! Real American patriots know that dissent is possible only in America, and therefore unnecessary. Actual dissenters, who don’t bathe very often and who habitually abuse the privilege granted them by the military, are therefore traitors. To Gitmo with ‘em all!

And Roger Simon:

I’d like to log in on Zell Miller. That was one down home stemwinder out of the 1930s he gave and I agreed with pretty much everything he said. I think a lot of the negative reaction comes from the general lack of (or fear of) honesty in polite society. You’re not supposed to say what you think. You’re supposed to mask it.

And finally, last but not least, on how Bush’s War on Terror kicks serious butt whereas Bush’s new War to Teach Our Children the Equation for the Volume of a Cone is lame-ass nanny-state nonsense:

Me:  Leadership is all about “making decisions you think are right, and then standing behind those decisions.” Even when it looks like your decision to invade Iraq was based on the advice of a notorious kleptomaniac who was possibly serving as a double agent for Iranian mullahs, you stand behind your decision, because leadership is all about making decisions you think are right and then standing behind them. Um, I said that already. But that’s all right, because it makes it even more true!! And I stand firm in repeating what I said about leadership!!

. . . Why, why, why would Bush mention the economy at a time like this? I thought the important thing was that he will grab terrorists by the throat. All I wanted to know was whether he would rip out the terrorists’ jugular veins or tear their windpipes from their necks. I didn’t want to hear about whether the economy was staggering under the eight count.

And Roger Simon:

Bush is the opposite [of Kerry], the original WYSIWYG candidate—for good or nil. He knows that too and that’s the best part of him. He said as much at the end of his speech last night, acknowledging many of us don’t agree with him on everything, but still soliciting our votes. I appreciated that candor because I certainly don’t. Of course it’s hard for me to imagine a candidate I would agree with on everything, but I admit I wince particularly when he addresses the social issues. Still, that was hardly a surprise and that is the pill I will have to swallow when I vote for him.

Of course that is also why I enjoyed the stomping War on Terror speeches… Giuliani, Miller, McCain… more than I did the others. I didn’t want to be reminded of the parts of Bush’s program with which I disagree.

-- What’s my point, you ask?  Well, I’m certainly not suggesting that Roger Simon copied off my hard work all week.  Simon is a fine, accomplished writer in his own right, and he knows the rules about this kind of thing.  I’m just saying what should be clear by now—that for conventional-wisdom peddlers and for former-liberals-turned-neocon-warriors alike, michaelberube.com is now the most trusted name in news analysis.

And about that Bush Bounce:  it’s no mirage.  I duplicated the Newsweek methodology myself over the weekend, polling eight Republicans, six Democrats, and six undecideds.  When pushed, the undecideds broke evenly, 3-3, and the results are just devastating for Kerry:  57-43 Bush, 55-45 even with the undecided vote.  This one’s over, folks.  You can stick a fork in Kerry—and then you can watch him flip-flop on the grill!!

Posted by Michael on 09/06 at 12:16 PM
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Friday, September 03, 2004

All Blogged Out

My sincere non-ironic and not-post-ironic-either thanks to everyone who stopped by this week, especially those of you who said such kind things about my work during my short but intense life as a wingnut.  I can’t tell you how much I appreciated it.  This RNC blogging was, shall we say, very rough on the family.  Not to mention the liver.  But at least I got an exhilarating helicopter ride out of it!  One-way, yeah, but still.

So I’m going to take it easy this weekend, and I hope you all do the same.  And if you find yourself enjoying your Labor Day, take a moment and thank your local labor-friendly progressives.  You know, the folks who thought up the “weekend” in the first place.

Posted by Michael on 09/03 at 09:19 AM
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Thursday, September 02, 2004

Last night

Readers, I have to beg for your compassion and your forgiveness.  I’m sorry-- I’ve never had to do this before on this humble blog, and I’m not sure exactly how to go about it.  But those of you who’ve written this week to tell me that I’ve been a fool or a knave to jump to the Republicans-- what can I say?  You were right.  I was wrong.  I should have listened to you back on Monday.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let me explain.

By 8 pm we were all pretty buzzed here in the Garden.  “You can’t spell ‘win’ without ‘w’,” said Rich Lowry, to which I replied, “you can’t spell ‘whoop-ass’ without ‘w’ either!” Whereupon we gave each other those manly hands-over-head forearm-taps that actual athletes exchange when they do something manly.  The evening had started off with some light amusement-- our suite had a Kerry Pinata, and like all pinatas, this one was amazingly resilient, so we didn’t get to consume the goodies until Grover Norquist got out the blowtorch and pliers and got all medieval on its ass.  And you know what the goodies were? no-bid contracts! Boo-yeah!  For about two hours tonight I held in my hands the exclusive contract for the provision of electricity to Najaf.  “Nick, my son,” I thought, “your tuition is definitely taken care of-- and me, I’m thinking about Hawaii.” Those were good times!

Then George Pataki took the stage.  Pataki said the right words in the right order, but Pataki was not strong enough or hard enough.  Seriously.  He had this weird breathless delivery that ended every sentence up half an octave, and I kept closing my eyes and thinking, this has got to be Will Ferrell doing his impression of Harry Caray.  At one point he said “This is no ordinary time. This is no ordinary time. The stakes could not be higher. Fate has handed our generation a grave new threat to freedom. And fortune has given us a leader who will defend that freedom. This is no ordinary time.” Yeah, OK, I get the sense that this is no ordinary time.  But “fortune” has given us George Bush?  What’s that about?  That’s some weird, pagan-atheist stuff right there, “fortune.” I thought to myself, didn’t Pataki get the memo? The Almighty God Himself gave us George Bush.  Fortune had nothing to do with it.  “Fortune"-- that sounds like something Niccolo Machiavelli would say, and he was a wannabe foreign leader.  Screw these northeastern gay-friendly Republicans anyway-- they’re window dressing.  Or in Guiliani’s case, window cross-dressing!! Ha ha ha ha!!  That line made everybody in the suite laugh so hard, and they all toasted me with their fine Republican political-elite liquor.  Those were good times too!

Then came actor-Senator-actor Fred Thompson from the heart and soul of America, introducing the W. introductory video:  How do you tell the story of a presidency? he asked.  The story is the story of a man, which leads, inescapably, to the question of who he is.  Uh, what kind of narrative theory is this, I wondered?  “History throws ya what it throws ya, and you never know what’s coming,” Thompson said. Well, yeah, I guess, when that historical document full of historical information about al-Qaeda appeared out of nowhere on August 6, 2001, there was no way of knowin’ what was comin’.  But better not to dwell on that, I thought.

The warmup video was intense, though!  The highlight-- indeed, the very conclusion-- was Bush throwing that pitch at Yankee Stadium.  That pitch told me what kind of man he is!  Despite the fact that the President was encumbered by a Secret Service bulletproof vest, it was a good strong, hard and firm pitch, not a flippy or floppy or Frenchy kind of throw.  It was a heroic pitch, the very pitch that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Winston Churchill might have thrown at Yankee Stadium.  And it was-- yes-- a strike, and surely Osama bin Laden noticed.  Oops!  Not supposed to mention Osama bin Laden.  Sorry, Karl!  Talk about missing the memo!  Won’t happen again, I told my new friends.

And then . . . and then . . . the man himself.  The thrower of strikes, the steel of spine, the President who has done more for human rights than any other President . . . Dubya!!  W.!!  43!!  I shouted myself hoarse.  We all did.

. . . and then, for the next half hour, I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. 

We have seen a shaken economy rise to its feet.

Why, why, why would Bush mention the economy at a time like this?  I thought the important thing was that he will grab terrorists by the throat.  All I wanted to know was whether he would rip out the terrorists’ jugular veins or tear their windpipes from their necks.  I didn’t want to hear about whether the economy was staggering under the eight count.

Since 2001, Americans have been given hills to climb, and found the strength to climb them. Now, because we have made the hard journey, we can see the valley below.

What does this mean?  We’re on top of the world?  Or is it all downhill from here?  And is that good or bad?  Is this the valley where we turn the corner?  Or did we already turn the corner before we climbed the hill?  Or maybe the hill was the corner?  Querulous, restive, scattered applause.

Then, some very strange family dynamics:

I am grateful to share my walk in life with Laura Bush. Americans have come to see the goodness and kindness and strength I first saw 26 years ago, and we love our First Lady.

I am a fortunate father of two spirited, intelligent, and lovely young women. I am blessed with a sister and brothers who are also my closest friends. And I will always be the proud and grateful son of George and Barbara Bush.

My father served eight years at the side of another great American-- Ronald Reagan. His spirit of optimism and goodwill and decency are in this hall, and in our hearts, and will always define our party.

Never mind the surrealist twins here.  I’m thinking, whoa, dude, not a word about your dad except that he served at Reagan’s side in that out-of-the-loopy way of his?  Hell, I can understand you not going into detail about Neil’s banking scandals and the whole Asian prostitution thing, sure, but “my father served eight years”?  Like the antecedent of “his spirit of optimism and goodwill and decency” is Ronald Reagan, and Poppy is left twisting in the syntactical wind? 

Yep, that’s the syntactical wind a-blowin’ through the Garden.  Screw Poppy-- he’s a loser, baby.  And here’s the next stuff.  Last night it was the fires of Zell, tonight it’s the gentle Zephyr of spring:

I believe every child can learn and every school must teach, so we passed the most important federal education reform in history. Because we acted, children are making sustained progress in reading and math, America’s schools are getting better, and nothing will hold us back.

Tepid applause.

I believe we have a moral responsibility to honor America’s seniors, so I brought Republicans and Democrats together to strengthen Medicare. Now seniors are getting immediate help buying medicine. Soon every senior will be able to get prescription drug coverage, and nothing will hold us back.

I remember back in 2002 when Howard Fineman was ridiculing Democrats as the party of prescription drugs.  And so does everyone else in Madison Square Garden.  Clap, clap, clap, we clapped.

I believe in the energy and innovative spirit of America’s workers, entrepreneurs, farmers and ranchers, so we unleashed that energy with the largest tax relief in a generation.

OK, fair enough-- America’s farmers and ranchers, freed from the fear that their $2,000,000-and-up estates would be taxed to death by the death tax, began to clear brush with a frenzy not seen since the days of Rutherford B. Hayes.  They unleashed all that energy.  Very good.  But where is this going?

If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy.  This will not happen on my watch.

The first thunderous applause of the night!  The Garden rocks!  We are so against the world drifting toward tragedy!!  We are the world-should-not-drift-toward-tragedy party!!  Four more years!

High-fives all around.  Here, we think, is where Bush will get hard and firm!  But then something odd happens.  Our man goes back to the workplace.

The times in which we work and live are changing dramatically. The workers of our parents’ generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often with one company that provided health care and a pension. And most of those workers were men.  Today, workers change jobs, even careers, many times during their lives. And in one of the most dramatic shifts our society has seen, two-thirds of all moms also work outside the home.

Uh, run that by me again?  Once upon a time, workers had job security, health care, and a pension-- and most of them were men.  Now we conservatives have eroded all that shit, and women work too, so our evisceration of job security and health care and pensions should be balanced by the entry of women into the workplace?  Me no get.

At this point, I turned to Norquist, sitting over to my right, and said, “Grovernator, dude, this shit does not make sense.” Grover just gave me a look.  Little did I know what that look meant at the time!

Meanwhile, down on the floor, things just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.  Bush spoke of the “explosion of frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across our country.” Sure, those frivolous lawsuits have cost Americans approximately 1.8 million jobs since Bush took office, as we all know, but this is an awfully wonky point to make in an acceptance speech.  He said he’d “reform and simplify the federal tax code” and “increase funding for community colleges.” And that wasn’t all.  Looking out over the crowd with compassionate firmness, the President said:

As I’ve traveled the country, I’ve met many workers and small- business owners who have told me that they are worried they cannot afford health care. More than half of the uninsured are small- business employees and their families.

In a new term, we must allow small firms to join together to purchase insurance at the discounts available to big companies.

We will offer a tax credit to encourage small businesses and their employees to set up health savings accounts and provide direct help for low-income Americans to purchase them. These accounts give workers the security of insurance against major illness, the opportunity to save tax-free for routine health expenses, and the freedom of knowing you can take your account with you whenever you change jobs.

Whenever you change jobs? you know, like whenever someone moves your cheese, you can find new cheese and bring your health savings account with you!  Or whenever you decide to get outsourced, you’ll have the opportunity to save tax-free!  Speaking of which, what about Social Security?

We must strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account, a nest egg you can call your own and government can never take away.

Uh, we must strengthen Social Security by allowing people to opt out of it so that the government can never take away their money?  At this point I was tugging on Grover’s sleeve, trying to get him to explain this part of the speech to me, when suddenly the President said,

As we make progress, we will require a rigorous exam before graduation.  No longer will we tolerate an America in which students are not required to memorize the formula for the volume of a cone until the tenth grade-- in a new term, every American child will know that 1/3 pi r squared times h gives you the keys to an ownership society in which seven million people over the next ten years will be able to say, “this is the volume of my cone,” and we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for the government’s volume-of-a-cone calculation programs. We will not allow a lack of attention or information to stand between these children and the geometry equations they need.

And then, to slap down all those skeptical liberal geometry teachers out there, Bush added, “anyone who wants more details on my federal geometry agenda can find them online.”

Cheers, cheers, and more cheers.  But when the cheers died down, Bush went off on this riff about how John Kerry wants to spend two quintillion dollars on government programs that tell people how to run their lives, and at that point, I had to poke Norquist again and say, “hsssst, Grovermeister man, this speech is seriously in the realm of Johnny Cochrane it-does-not-make-sense land.  Bush has got to talk about grabbing terrorists’ throats, m’fren’, and-- “

Readers, I never finished that sentence.  First, Grover turned to me, whistled for silence in the suite, and then took my tumbler of single-malt, walked slowly over to the wet bar, and ceremoniously dumped it in the sink.  Suddenly I felt a hand on my neck and a couple of hands in the small of my back, and before I knew it, four or five of my new friends were hustling me out of the suite, into the elevator, and right out one of Madison Square Garden’s service entrances on the 31st Street side.  Rich Lowry followed me down, roughly tossed my laptop and my no-bid Najaf contract to me, and said, “you should know that you’re now back on the Lynne List.  And if you blog about this, you French-fried flip-flopper, you can just forget about boarding an airplane for the next four years.”

So I never got to hear the part of Bush’s speech where he talked about “the protection of marriage against activist judges,” those black-robed fornicators who roam the land looking for innocent dogs and box turtles on whose tiny, innocent bodies they can slake their illicit thirsts.  And I think I was foraging for food outside the Post Office on Eighth Avenue when Bush spoke of our mission from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.  If someone could please tell me whether this mission was assigned to us by one of those newly-discovered Earth-like planets, I’d appreciate it.  But for now, I’ve got to find a comfortable doorway for the night.

Again, folks, I’m so sorry.  It’s been a rough week all round, and I apologize to my old friends in the effete arugula-eating liberal elite.  Please forgive me-- it was just so intoxicating being embraced by the real elite, being toasted around town as “the conscience of the left blogosphere” and being asked to do my “ah-agree-with-the-governor” impersonation of Al Gore.  Can I please come back?  I promise I’ll never be hornswaggled again. . . .

Posted by Michael on 09/02 at 08:42 PM
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The morning after

Whew!  My head is still spinning from last night.  And what a night it was!  It was a night of meat-- good, juicy, fleshy meat, not like those tofu-and-Belgian-endive nights you get at the Democrat conventions.  I thought we got our message across loud and clear: George Bush has a spine of tempered steel.  John Kerry has a spine of arugula.  Bush will protect your family and smash terrorism.  Kerry will sell your family into slavery in the Sudan because he thinks American troops are occupiers instead of liberators.

But then I wake up and check out the liberal media, and what do I see?  Nothing but whining and whinging, coast to coast.  “Oh, Zell Miller looked so angry,” say all the girlie-men in the press.  “I think maybe he was a little over the top.” Hell yeah, he was angry!  Damn straight, he was over the top!  He was angrier than a Georgia chicken in a bread pan without any dough!  Jeezus Christmas, you’d be angry too, if Chris Matthews asked you a question!  Here’s this Matthews fella going on about “when Democrats come out, as they often do, liberal Democrats, and attack conservatives, and say they want to starve little kids, they want to get rid of education, they want to kill the old people” and Zell is supposed to sit still for that?  How dare Chris Matthews ask the Zellster a setup question about how nasty liberals are!  Zell should have taken him out right there, from ten paces.  I know I would have.  And now all you’re going to hear from the liberal media is “oh, oh, I think maybe Zell Miller is too ‘hot’ for television, ouch, he burned my hand, I need one of those Democrat Band-Aids with the little purple hearts on them.” Listen up, liberal media. When the devil comes down to Georgia, you bet your sweet ass he’s too “hot” for television!  Fire on the mountain, run boys run!!

And what’s all this crying and moaning about how the Republicans don’t have an agenda?  What, you people weren’t listening?  Exactly how loud do we have to shout it out tonight?  You want an agenda, we’ll give you an agenda.  Take out your little girlie-man pencil cases and start writing it down in your little newspapers:

On health care:  we will knock Democrats’ teeth down their throats!
On jobs: we will kick Democrats until they die of internal bleeding!
On education:  we will show America that John Kerry is even more liberal than Ted Kennedy!
On the deficit:  John Kerry looks French!
On the environment:  John Kerry’s wife is a rich foreigner! who is insane!
On corporate crime: John Kerry shot himself to get out of Vietnam!  and he was never there!  and he didn’t even know how to fire a gun!
On intelligence and security: John Edwards is a pretty boy!
On nuclear proliferation: John Edwards is a trial lawyer!
On Iraq: Democrats are traitors!

So.  You people want to debate the issues, we’ll give you “issues.” Tonight, our leader brings it all home.  Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  Almost forgot!  Back home in State College, Pennsylvania, three guys have smashed in the storefront window of the Centre County Democratic HQ.  Now there’s a platform we can build on:  A Brick For Every Democrat!!!  Way to rock, boys!

Posted by Michael on 09/02 at 08:51 AM
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Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Third night

By 10 pm, I have to admit, I was pumped.  Partly it was the cosmopolitans with Lynne, the rounds of Macallan with Rich Lowry, and the white wine with Horowitz, but when prime time rolled around, I was as ready as anyone to rock on down the Highway to Zell.  But hey, did you catch the music that followed the Sensitive Bush Family Montage?  “I Like Soul with a Capital S,” followed by “Soul Man"-- that was my idea, honest.  And the delegates dug it.  Some clapped on the 2 and the 4, some clapped on the 1 and the 3, but who cares?  Republicans can disagree about these things and still represent the best of America.

Then we introduced Zell with “The Devil Came Down to Georgia.” That wasn’t my idea.  I don’t know what it was supposed to signify.  And we didn’t even get to the dueling fiddle solos!  Or the rousing chorus, “chicken in the bread pan, go fry dough.”

Nonetheless, the Zellraiser started off on fire: “Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?” he asked.  Our nation is being torn apart by Democrats and their obsession to bring down our Commander-in-Chief!  And that, my friends, is why we cannot unite the country the way we so desperately want to: these goddamn Democrats are a bunch of soft-bellied traitors!  They insist on seeing American soldiers as occupiers, not liberators, when in fact, as Zell pointed out, the soldier, not the reporter, has given us the freedom of the press.  Many cheers for this line from the crowd below me in the Garden!  Screw those reporters who abuse the freedom of the press!  Just like the soldier, not the agitator, has given us freedom of expression.  Damn to hell fire those protestors who abuse the privilege of freedom of speech!  Real American patriots know that dissent is possible only in America, and therefore unnecessary.  Actual dissenters, who don’t bathe very often and who habitually abuse the privilege granted them by the military, are therefore traitors.  To Gitmo with ‘em all!

And Zell kept rocking: no one should be Commander-in-Chief who “doesn’t believe with all his heart that our soldiers are liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home.” Well, duh!  Maybe three days ago I would have signed up with John Kerry and his legions of “Americans-are-imperialist-occupiers” friends in the Workers World Party, but there’s no way I’d sign on with the Kerry-Edwards “End the Illegal U.S. Occupation-- All Power to Al-Sistani and Al-Sadr” platform today. Did you know that Kerry opposed every single American weapons system except spitballs? That’s right, people-- the only defense appropriation he supported was S.184 in 1987, authorizing the United States to use spitballs against Libya-- but only with United Nations approval! What an abject loser this Kerry is!  What a fraud!!  He thinks we should “let Paris decide when America needs defending.” Yeah, like Paris defended itself in 1940!!

Then Zell said that Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat, whereas Kerry wants to serve them a yes no maybe bowl of mush.  Damn, I know who I want as my CIC, Zell-meister.  When Bush is through with grabbing those grimy terrorist throats in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, they won’t even be able to swallow a Kerry bowl of mush!  You know what I’m talking about!!  Then Zell says:  “I have knocked on the door of this man’s soul and found someone home, a God-fearing man with a good heart and a spine of tempered steel.” Though I have to say, in a respectful, Republican kind of way, that this is a little weird.  You knocked on the door of his soul?  Was it the front door?  Who, precisely, was home that day?  Was it George himself, or maybe Laura, or one of the staff?  Is his soul lodged right near his tempered-steel spine, or is it closer to the pineal gland, where it should be?  Dark, disturbing questions.  I wish Zell had not Zell-raised them.

I had to take a quick shower in the skybox spa after Zell was done, so I missed my friend Lynne.  I hear she was very heterosexual and forceful, not at all like Hitlery.  But I towelled myself off in time for the main event, retaking my seat just as Dick strode onto the stage.

Now listen, folks, I still like the Macallan flowing in this suite and the servants and everything, but I have to admit that Dick Cheney is a little bit scary.  You all can’t see it on your TVs at home, but here in the Garden it’s quite clear that there’s a ghostly face protruding from the back of his skull, and on the monitors I can tell that it’s Spiro Agnew’s face.  Seriously, the nose and the jowls give it away.  Yes, I know, Agnew’s supposed to be dead. But what if his spirit lived on, unbeknownst to us? More disturbing questions.  Maybe Nixon’s spirit is among us too, looking for a body to inhabit.  You know, there is no good and evil, only power-- and those too weak to use it! Sure, it sounds weird-- but I’ve been here for twelve hours and still haven’t seen the back of Karl Rove’s head.  I’ll let you know, is all I can say.

It seems that Dick Cheney’s family came from humble origins too, just like some of those Democrats.  But he went to government schools?  Who wants to hear about that?  Yeah, yeah, he cares about the public schools, sure, but we don’t.  We came to hear Big Dick making fun of Kerry and Edwards!  Say something about the French, dammit!!

More disappointment.  Jobs are up, home ownership is up, the Bush tax cuts are working.  We know all that.  It has been proven true by independent economic analysts of some kind.  But what about Democrats destroying our families?  Zell said that Democrats would stand by idly while our children and grandchildren were slaughtered.  You’ve got to take it to the next level, Dick!  And tell Agnew to stop nattering out of the back of your head!  The crosstalk is really distracting!

OK, here’s a real screw-you moment!  About time!  We’re going to have health care that serves patients and good doctors, not personal injury lawyers!  All right!  I don’t know about the details of the Republican health plan, but we definitely need to kill all the lawyers and their blood-sucking designer Jacuzzi cases.  That means you, Breck Girlie Man!  Oh yeah!!

Then things got kind of scattered.  Iraq was a “gathering threat.” I thought it was a gathering storm or an imminent threat, but what the hell.  And Libya’s weapons are now in Oak Ridge, Tennessee?  Why would Dick Cheney say that?  Was that a signal of some kind?  I’m still too new here to tell.

All right!  Here comes the Kerry-trashing!  “The president’s opponent speaks of his service in Vietnam and we honor him for it.” Scattered golf-clapping.  But in the 1980s he opposed the weapons systems that won the Cold War, like the MX missile that destroyed Leningrad, the B-2 bomber that levelled Vladivostok, and the AE-145 drone that occupied Gorbachev’s very own skull!  Boo Kerry!!  Boo boo!!  Flip flop, flip flop!!  People bring out their flip flops-- and the crowd goes wild!!

Kerry thinks we should fight a “more sensitive war on terror, as though Al-Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.” Ha ha!  That was a good one, Dick.  We have no softer side!!  We are hard all around, from tip to root!

Then Dick says, “We are faced with an enemy who seeks the deadliest of weapons to use against us, and we cannot wait for the next attack.” Truer words were never spoke, Halliburton Man!  We can hardly wait for that next attack.  The first attack gave us a 90 percent approval rating-- the next attack will give us unprecedented extraconstitutional powers!  All I can say is Bring It On!!

Now for the money shot: “George W. Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the American people.” Straight up and solid!  Very hard and firm-- just what we came for!! When John Kerry said he would ask Jacques Chirac for permission to defend my family, that’s when I signed up with the all-hard party. Party hard, hard party!

But then, oddly enough, Dick Cheney speaks of the “wisdom and humility we expect from our President.” He says Bush has “a heart for the weak and the vulnerable and the afflicted.” What does this mean, he’s sensitive or something?  Humility?  Heart?  Bush gets up every day trying to preserve freedom?  Tell it to the wives, Cheney Man. Get back to smashing Kerry’s Frenchified face!!

Well, I was bouncing around the suite for a while pumping my fists and expressing myself, and my new friends had to remind me that Fox was on and that I should chill for a few minutes with a tumbler of fine single-malt.  Thanks, new friends.  I was getting a little carried away with all the Zell-raising and the Dick-hardening.  On our direct feed to Fox, Bill Kristol was calmly pointing out that Kerry doesn’t have “much to be proud of in his Senate record” and that the attacks on his patriotism were “not personal or mean-spirited.” Fred Barnes sagely added that “it is significant that Zell Miller didn’t scream” like that lunatic Howard Dean, and Mara Liasson of NPR noted that the Republicans got the bigger prize in the Zell Miller- Ron Reagan Jr. swap.

All in all, it’s been a good night here among the real elite.  I just wish that Spiro Agnew’s face hadn’t kept CGI-morphing and hissing out of the back of Dick Cheney’s skull.  But my thanks, once again, to everyone who encouraged me to blog this convention!  I had no idea how much fun it would be.  And tomorrow will be even better than today. . . .

UPDATE:  Check out the cool graphics at Corrente!  The Farmer wasn’t in the house like I was, but he got the feeling of the night just right.

Posted by Michael on 09/01 at 07:33 PM
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Live from New York!

That’s right, I’m now on the scene, blogging from a corporate box in Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Committee has helicoptered me in from central Pennsylvania.  It seems that they’ve been reading this blog over the past two days, and they really like what they see.  Thanks, guys!  You’ve been very sweet to me.  And the helicopter ride rocked.

Unfortunately, not everyone has been so sweet lately.  Some of my former friends in the Democrat party have been getting pretty wild-eyed, just like their stumbling standardbearer, and a few of you have even posted some nasty remarks about me on various liberal blogs.  “A traitor to the left,” says one.  “He was always horrible,” says another. “You are the least shrewd, most willing-to-be hornswoggled academic I’ve ever run into,” says a third-- on this very site!  Everyone wants to know:  how could I do it? After a lifetime of believing passionately in egalitarian social justice, in democratic secularism, in human rights for every living human regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or disability, how could I flip to the Republicans in only one night of watching the convention on TV?  Exactly how stupid or craven am I? 

Well, let’s try to figure out just whose horn is being swoggled, people. Do you know how much money we’re talking about here? I’ve spent my adult life as a member of the liberal cultural elite, living in college towns and teaching literature.  I thought I was pretty sharp, with my “postmodern” this and my “cultural studies” that.  But do you have any idea how the real elite in this country live?  Holy mother of God in a public creche, folks, you can’t begin to imagine the perks around here.  To hell with the cultural elite-- they couldn’t see Dick Cheney’s tax bracket if the entire English department at Harvard stood on each other’s shoulders.  The political elite is where it’s at, people, the economic elite.  Now there’s an elite.  And let me tell you, it is mighty, mighty fine up here.  No more Genny Cream Ale in cans for me-- there’s nothing in this suite but Macallan and Stoli.  And the servants couldn’t be nicer.  Everyone here treats them with honest-to-God conservative compassion, and they seem to be just fine with that.

Where is all the money coming from, you ask?  Well, from many sources, all of them legit, not like your drug-running, Holocaust-avoiding Soros fellow.  But the main pipeline (so to speak!-- that’s a little joke in our suite) is Iraq appropriations.  Remember that $8.8 billion that went “missing” last week?  I’m looking at some of it right now, people.  It’s in a suitcase next to the hors d’oeuvres, and it’s pretty goddamned impressive.  Think Pulp Fiction.  I can’t say anything more at the moment, but I can assure you that it’s being put to good use as I type.  So here’s to Iraq-- let freedom reign!

This afternoon, Rich Lowry of the National Review stopped by to offer me a guest spot at NRO.  He was really nice-- he suggested that I’d fill a crucial niche over there, since, as he put it, nobody at the magazine knows “jack shit” about American culture.  “No one on our staff has seen a play, gone to a movie, listened to a new CD, danced at a club, or read a work of fiction in the past five years-- seriously, it’s just Jonah and his ‘Republicans-can-quote-the-Simpsons-too’ routine.  You’d basically have the entire field to yourself.” He’s right, you know.  They’re not crazy about my hockey thing, but I’m sure we can work that out.  After all, the great thing about America is that Republicans can disagree with each other!

Whoa, gotta run-- I’m meeting Lynne Cheney for cosmopolitans at the Royalton.  We have a lot to catch up on-- and I’ve got a list of names I have to give her before she goes on tonight.  Back later with the results of Cheneyfest!

Posted by Michael on 09/01 at 12:26 PM
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