Exactly what did the RNC convention accomplish last night other than dishonest, dishonorable mud slinging?

 

It certainly hasn't shown that it is the party of competence and accountability.  Hell, right wing Republicans have held the presidency for the last seven years, the Congress for over a decade before last year, and now the Supreme Court, and have succeeded in damaging this country.  Yet, McSame, Palin and the RNC are hypocritically campaigning on change!  Such hubris!

 

David Roberts at The Grist (h/t Cursor.org) has this to say: "Is there anything stranger than a room full of affluent, privileged white people who have run the country for almost a decade cheering wildly for a provincial small-town girl who promises to shake up Washington?

"As strange as the populism has become, nowhere is it more bizarre than on the subject of energy. Somehow drilling -- offering historically profitable oil companies access to protected American ecosystems so that they can make more money by selling our oil on the world market -- has become a crie du coeur for the Little Guy. Somehow building nuclear plants, the greatest example of corporate welfare in the last half century, is something They won't let us do, another baleful result of political correctness.

"At one point during Giuliani's speech, the entire auditorium, thousands and thousands of people, began chanting in unison, "drill baby drill! Drill baby drill!" Giuliani smiled at first but then tried to tamp it down and eventually started talking over it. He's not exactly the most judicious politician, but even he could sense that there was something deeply, deeply weird about it. (Perhaps the only weirder moment of the night was when Palin castigated the media and delegates on the floor, en masse, started shouting and gesturing angrily up toward the media booth -- I felt a brief twinge of fear that I was about to witness actual violence.)

"The policies of the economic royalists are still being packaged as populism, despite the grim evidence of the last eight years -- and the base is now chanting about it. What's next? Will the base take up arms about a tax that only affects people making more than $2 million? Oh, right."

And Chris Hayes at The Nation weighs in: "What was remarkable last night was how completely absent anything remotely that specific was from the podium. I mean, you had people coming on stage talking about starting an organization to help struggling family farmers, or battling a life-threatening illness and there was zero political content whatsoever. I kept waiting for the moral of the story, but it never came. The moral, I suppose, was: people helping other people is good. People overcoming personal obstacles is good. Ok, sure. What the hell does this have to do with who should be president?

"The point, I'm trying to make is that there are relative degrees of cant, and there's a direct relationship between the strength of a political coalition and how specific it can be. The weaker you are the more anodyne, the less popular you are, the more cant. Think of a set of concentric circles: on the outer most ring, for, say, the Democratic party is a stipulation about mandates being the best policy mechanism to deliver universal healthcare. This is controversial, so it didn't appear during the four days in Denver. But retreat one circle back towards the center and you have the proposition "All Americans should have access to quality affordable healthacare." This is both a consensus within the party, and very popular among voters, so Democrats said it again and again from the podium,

"But Republicans can't say that because they don't believe it. So they have to move yet another layer in, to something like "It's better to be healthy than sick." This is a party that is so ideologically exhausted and discredited, that it has to retreat into the tiny, little core at the center of its worldview where words like "service", "honor" and "country" have some kind of totemic force, in order to be able to say anything at all. But the question is: What do you plan to do with the country when you run it?"

Also, another totemic force, that of patriotism, is wielded like a cudgel by McSame and the right wing Republicans.   However, don't forget that this patriotism, these reactionary Republicans' brand which is a false patriotism, is the last refuge of scoundrels.