What earrings would you choose for visiting a national disaster?Asks John Aravosis, displaying this picture of Sarah Palin wearing supposedly disrespectful hoop earrings while accompanying John McCain to Mississippi to speak about the approaching Hurricane Gustav.
Let me be the first to say that I've never politically opposed anyone's vagina.
Now, I've known liars in my life. Their single core problem is not with themselves, but those around them. If they're never called out on their twisting of truths and fabrications, they simply continue to make larger lies.Whew! That is ugly. Pictures are posted, with captions like: "Sarah's waistline never changed. Her wardrobe still remained tight and professional." Note the gratuitous insult to pregnant working women. They can't possibly dress in a professional manner. There are also enlarged photos of the 16-year-old daughter with comments about the shape of her abdomen. The whole world is invited to talk about that teenager's body.
Well, Sarah, I'm calling you a liar. And not even a good one. Trig Paxson Van Palin is not your son. He is your grandson. The sooner you come forward with this revelation to the public, the better.
"You know, I think we really underestimate people in the neighborhood. In the neighborhoods I came from, you came from. I really think we underestimate them," Biden remarked. "People get it. I think they're looking for more than whether or not Joe Biden's from Scranton and she hunts. I think that's you know, 'What ya gonna do about it?'"
"But you tried really hard to reach these people. You went and sipped beer, which I know you don't particularly like - I mean you even…," Kroft remarked.
"Steve, I had a beer last night. I mean, where do these stories come from, man?" Obama asked.
"I'm the one… [that] doesn't drink," Biden pointed out.
"Where does the story come from that…I don't like beer? …C'mon, man," Obama said.
"You even tried bowling," Kroft remarked.
"Time out there," Obama said.
"I've got to defend my bowling honor here," Obama said, laughing. "It is true that my bowling score left something to be desired. The reason I bowled though, wasn't to try to get votes....."
Affection, hugging and caring for others would make a big comeback....
All people would be encouraged to develop and use their gifts for helping others....
People would be refreshingly honest and genuine....
We believe, too, that a stuffy high society would probably not do well in the world of Down syndrome.
However, we believe that BIG dress up dances would flourish. People with Down syndrome love dressing up and dancing at big shindigs. They have a ball, and ...can they dance!...
People engaged in self talk would be considered thoughtful and creative. Self talk rooms would be reserved in offices and libraries to encourage this practice.....
Order and Structure would rule...
Um...let's not forget that adults with Down Syndrome aren't just perpetually-innocent children in big-people bodies. They still have things like libidos and the capacity to act hatefully. They're just as human as the rest of us and it's unspeakable that people will abort their Down Syndrome babies, but these aren't supermen but simply men.I respond:
Man, I feel like I just harshed some mellow. I'll just go back to my legal reading now.
Hokie, sure, we know that. This is just an effort to encourage respect for people who are part of the diversity of humanity.I don't really want people with Down syndrome to rule the world. "Order and Structure would rule"... I think we know how things like that work out in practice.
I'm getting a vibe from some of the anti-Palin writings on the web that it's irresponsible to give birth to a Down's child unless you are planning to give up all your other aspirations in life. To me, this is thinly veiled abortion-encouragement, and it's quite horrifying.
"I wouldn't call it a nightmare, but it is a very perplexing challenge," said a GOP official planning the event.Be careful. People will say you're just trying to claim viewers, and the viewers are going to want to see pictures of the big storm. They are going to want to see reporters dodging shards of metal.
A senior McCain source said Saturday that officials are considering turning the convention into a service event, a massive telethon to raise money for the Red Cross and other agencies to help with the hurricane.
I guess Michael Moore was right. There is a God in heaven. And he, in his wisdom, has provided a convenient excuse for W and C not to appear in St. Paul.
The development nearly incapacitated my housemate; he spent the remainder of the speech in a nervous fit, wishing aloud that one polite delegate would flag down the candidate and discretely wipe his own mouth, the telltale indication that Obama “has got something … right over … no … a little to the left … there, you’ve got it.”...Ha ha. This brings back fond memories of blogging for me. From October 13, 2004, live-blogging the last Bush-Kerry debate:
Near the speech’s end, Obama did move to wipe the corner of his mouth, causing a grand celebration among the party. However, the move only displaced the spittle, helping it to migrate lower down the lip.
Bush is smiling a lot, and the left side of his mouth nevertheless turns down oddly. A glob of foam forms on the right side of his mouth! Yikes! That's really going to lose the women's vote. [UPDATE: the NYT and the WaPo take note of this, and only this, observation and I react to that attention here....]And that was without HDTV. That was the first time this blog got quoted in the NYT, so I'm pretty nostalgic about Bush's spittle. But I'm looking back on the vague, fuzzy past. We've got a new crisp guy now and a wrinkly old geezer and, with HDTV, we'll be able to inspect the individual bubbles of any mouth foam.
I read that Maureen Dowd piece twice but I still don’t get it. Sarah Palin can’t have it all? Only a loser rube would believe what's uncontested and be charmed by early stage Palin? Dick Cheney’s a bantamweight cheerleader? Heck, I didn’t even know there were weight classes in cheerleading. Color me confused.Paul Zrimsek said:
Was Quayle ever considered fun? I recall that he was the Devil incarnate for a while for having the nerve to suggest that Murphy Brown was unwise to try single motherhood. Since we now learn that a woman can't combine family and career even with the aid of a husband, it may be that Quayle's been forgiven.Freeman Hunt said:
I am getting extremely offended by this liberal meme that attractive women are nothing more than beauty queens regardless of their accomplishments. Palin has accomplished more in her short time in office than most accomplish over entire careers. But none of that matters; she's pretty, so that's all she is.Yeah, and it reinforces that sexist meme that feminism is a plot to help unattractive women get ahead.
Absolute sexism.
So being president of Harvard Law Review is now an important qualification for POTUS, particularly if the the other party's VP candidate went to the University of Idaho? LOL, good luck with that one.To which Bissage responds:
Yeah, really. This ordinary-people-get-to-vote thing's a real bitch.
"These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them," Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Baluchistan province....
"Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."...
Zehri told a packed and stunned Parliament on Friday that Baluch tribal traditions helped stop obscenity and then asked fellow lawmakers to stop making such a fuss about it.
La Tomatina: Food-fight festival held annually in Bunol, Spai, involving over-ripe tomatoes....I'm perfectly content to allow multitudes of "locals" around the world to have their fun and work out their obsessions and fantasies without having me checking them out.
Devil Dancers of Corpus Christi: Locals dressed as devils dance under the tropical sun in church squares all over Venezuela each summer....
Hounen Matsuri: An annual Japanese fertility festival with a 7ft wooden phallus carried to a Shinto shrine....
Chung Yuan Ghost Month Festival: A celebration of dead spirits in Taiwan features the burning of paper money.
[The teacher, Avery] began to mumble about "three different universes of interpretation" in which the text of The Trial could be read: one universe in which K. is an innocent man falsely accused, another universe in which the degree of K.'s guilt is undecidable... I was only half listening. The windows were darkening, and it was a point of pride with me never to read secondary literature. But when Avery arrived at the third universe of interpretation, in which Josef K. is guilty, he stopped and looked at us expectantly, as if waiting for us to get some joke; and I felt my blood pressure spike. I was offended by the mere mention of the possibility that K. was guilty. It made me feel frustrated, cheated, injured. I was outraged that a critic was allowed even to suggest a thing like that.
The "truly" isn't even in the original -- it's "etwas Böses," something bad/evil, which is meant to be a little ironic, I think.
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
[I]f McCain wins, Palin is vice president and at least gets a very good shot at becoming the heir apparent to Republican nomination for the presidency. This would take Hillary's issue -- her firstness -- away from her, and Hillary would become a lot more like just another Democratic pol.But if Obama wins, he's first-y too, and firstiness will lose pizzazz.
THE VIDEO YOU ARE TRYING TO WATCH IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE.The hell.
PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON.
I had been thinking that if Obama wins, it will mean that we are done with Baby Boomer Presidents, after having only 2 — young Bush and male Clinton. I thought that was rather pathetic for this big, famous generation of mine.I got a lot of flak in the comments from people who said Obama -- Oboomer -- was a boomer. I was relying on a NYT article, "Shushing the Baby Boomers."
In taking the first steps toward a presidential candidacy last week, Mr. Obama, who was born in 1961 and considers himself a member of the post-boomer generation, said Americans hungered for “a different kind of politics,” one that moved beyond the tired ideological battles of the 1960s....Now, that was written way back in January 2007. We're so much older now! How did that glowing picture of Obama hold up? Speaking of glowing pictures, click through to the Times to see what a caricature of Obama looked like, all those many months ago.
Mr. Obama calculates that Americans of all ages are sick of the feuding boomers and ready to turn to the generation that came of age after Vietnam, after the campus culture wars between freaks and straights, and after young people had given up on what überboomer Hillary Rodham Clinton (who made her own announcement on the Web yesterday) called in a 1969 commencement address a search for “a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.”...
“In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”
Palin is the common man's dream wife. Smart, accomplished, beautiful, was a sportscaster, loves to hunt and fish.It's not perfectly feminist, Sloan, but I understand what you mean, and I think it's something that will appeal to many of the swing voters. As a feminist, I love that she did not leverage herself into power through her husband and consider this an important improvement over Hillary.
Perhaps Palin is the "post-feminist" woman. She competes in a mans world being governor of the largest state, but she can still be feminine (a mother and wife).
Hmmm... maybe Ann will have fun with this analysis.
Neighbor: So what do you think of Clinton's Supreme Court pick?That was 15 years ago, and I was more radical then. But the feeling remains. It means something. I was resistant to Hillary (because I think she betrayed women by attacking women to support Bill), but I know the feeling of women my age wanting to see women get through to the top.
Me: I'm so glad he picked a woman.
Neighbor: Really. You care about that?
Me: Yeah!
Neighbor: I mean, we already have a woman on the Court. It's not a first. At some point, it's not special to pick a woman. When will you not care about it anymore?
Me: When there are 5 women on the Court -- in proportion to the population. 5, not 4, because women are more than 50% of the population.
Three senior Republican sources said they had been told Palin was McCain's choice. But those accounts came amidst conflicting reports about whether Palin had arrived here on a chartered plane last night or was still in Alaska.Yikes. I Google for a list of the states in order of population and see that Alaska is the 4th smallest state by that measure. [AND: I was about to add that we think of Alaska as really big, but it's tiny by population. Only Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota are smaller. Biden's state -- I mean Delaware -- is bigger.]
Republicans have never nominated a woman for their ticket, and Palin's scant experience would make her a surprise choice. She was elected governor two years ago, and before that was mayor of Wasilla (pop. 6,715).
[P]eople with almost not debating chops routinely "win" political debates.I was just reading that in the comments, and now, I notice it's the topic on CNN too. I flip over to Fox for a second, and there's a smiling Palin, in a light green t-shirt and eating a vanilla ice cream cone. Voice over: "People love her."
Often these debates are "won" entirely on facial hair and body language. Palin could "win" a debate with Biden just by not looking like a warmed-over stiff.
Even if the debates were real debates, the fact that Palin is inexperienced politically has no bearing on her debating skills.
We know she'd cream Biden in 1 on 1 basketball. The debates have about the same relationship to political experience as that.
Man, the leftist whackos and nutroots are going to come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. Pallin wears fur, she hunts and eats moose burgers, she is a life long member of the NRA, and the worst, the absolute worst crime -- her husband is a fisherman who works in the oil fields in the off-season. Yep, a regular working stiff. The kind of guy they hate and are jealous of. Not a lawyer or a fuzzy headed policy wonk; not a professor of basket weaving or Mayan Mysticism, not someone who lives off the teat of government grants; but a real, solid, hard core, working man. A guy who gets his hands dirty every day. The average Joe American.10:35: On CNN, they're reading messages off their website, including the statement that McCain "is trying to out-minority Barack Obama." Earth to nameless CNN website commenter: Women are not a minority.
What makes her even more odious is she actually worked with her husband on the fishing boats. She really, actually worked for a living. The Gospel chorus is lining up to rage and rant; “my God, how can he pick someone like that? Working people, why, they, they, they, know too much about real life!”
PETA, the anti-gun nuts, ELF, KOS, MYDD, Huffingglue and probably a host of others will be gnashing their teeth, pounding their drums, shaking their chubby little fists and green tamborines, and going into full, foaming at the mouth, rabid attack mode. They are going to have heartastrokes over this.
Alaska! With Hawaii represented by Barack Obama, it would be cool to give the other latecomer state some respect at this time. It's always troubled me that Hawaii's been so far off and disconnected from the rest of the United States, and it's good that there's another disconnected state to keep it company. (You know when I was a kid in the 1950s, I heard discussion of Alaska becoming a state, and when someone said "I hear Hawaii is coming in too," I thought the islands were somehow floating over and would connect to the west coast.) Alaska's important too: oil-related. We're going to be talking about gas prices, and having the governor of Alaska will resonate.10:39: We're over 200 comments, so switch the commenting to the new Palin post, here. And I'll carry on there too.
*Joe Biden showed exactly why Americans are rallying behind the Democratic ticket to deliver the change the country needs.I love all that "exactly." I mean, if I were speaking in reliance on those talking points and someone followed up with the question, "You say he showed exactly what we need, but what exactly was so exact about what he said?," I would melt into a quivering pool of jelly.
* Last night, Joe Biden told it like it is. And everyone at the Pepsi Center—and around the nation—responded. He showed exactly why Americans are rallying behind the Democratic ticket to deliver the change the country needs....
Never let it be said that Republicans and their counterparts in the conservative blogosphere (yes, Ann “I Like To Drink Wine and Blog About American Idol” Althouse, I’m looking right at you) can’t attempt to manufacture a scandal out of thin air that shows just how stupid they are. ...Uh, yeah, so you won't "dignify" me with a link because... why? Because it would show that I said all along that it could either look like a Greek temple, as Reuters reported, or it might look like federal government buildings, and we wouldn't know until we actually saw it. Nicole Belle, who wrote that post, is shamefully dishonest. She flaunts her dishonesty by not linking to the text she was writing about because it would show that her post is vicious character assassination. I associate Crooks and Liars with John Amato, who I think is a good person, and I call on him to do something about the sleazy post that is messing up his blog.
So Ann “Liberal Boobies Enrage Me” Althouse whips herself up into a righteous indignation, which is promptly echoed throughout the other sites. (I won’t dignify her with a link, look it up) How dare Obama? Is he trying to suggest that he’s a God or something??? The presumption! Do you see how messianic he is? His supporters are like a cult! (imagine her furious fingers typing away)
But see, here’s the problem, Ann. You clearly haven’t traveled. If you had actually ever gone to the seat of our federal government, Washington DC, guess what you’d see? Columns! Know why? Because most of our federal buildings were designed in an architectural style called…wait for it…Greek Revival. Which means, you know, lots of columns. Like the ones in the front and back of the White House–where Obama will reside in January, by the way. And the ones in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where exactly 45 years ago today, Martin Luther King gave a speech....
This weekend I will be hosting two couples. One is very far left, the other libertarian right. Me? Conservative, former lefty.I'd go meta. Say you asked this very question on a somewhat popular blog, and it was what everyone was talking about last Thursday, and here are some of the cool things they said.
On the phone to the lefty last night the husband remarked about the DNC (we were not talking politics but food): "I hope someone in Minneapolis gets Bush and Cheney and strings them up."
My resonse was a silent "WTF?" I said. Uh ...yeah. Aannnnnyway, I'll bring the wine.
So my question, a serious one: How do I manage this, a weekend -- during the GOP convention- with a Euro social democrat and Karl Popper's son? Avoidance? Giant underpants? Drunkenness?
Bill Buckley was famous for getting along with ideological opposites. But it seems people are far more polarized and angry than in the past. I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't show up at all.
Of course Obama is a progressive.... But, by nature, he is also an independent thinker, and he listens to all sides. One of his most distinctive features is that he is a minimalist, not in the sense that he always favors small steps (he doesn't), but because he prefers solutions that can be accepted by people with a wide variety of theoretical inclinations.He is infinitely complex, people. It's you that need to get up to speed. Readjust. Visionary minimalism makes everything right.
When he offers visionary approaches, he does so as a visionary minimalist -- that is, as someone who attempts to accommodate, rather than to repudiate, the defining beliefs of most Americans. His reluctance to challenge people's deepest commitments might turn out to be what makes ambitious plans possible--notwithstanding the hopes of the far left and the cartoons of the far right.
Just as he resists ideological templates, Obama does not believe in "triangulation"; his skepticism about conventional ideological categories is principled, not strategic.(Did that hurt, Bill?)
Obama does not follow old-line political orthodoxies. Above all, Obama's form of pragmatism is heavily empirical; he wants to know what will work.That can't be wrong.
[I]n his empiricism, his curiosity, his insistence on nuance, and his lack of dogmatism, Obama is indeed a sort of anti-Bush--and perhaps the best kind. If the Bush administration has often operated on the basis of the president's "instinct," we should expect to see, from Obama, a rigorously evidence-based government....If I could know that's all true, I would vote for Obama. But it could just as well be a guise, a cover, to get me to fall for something I'm not going to want at all. After you do all that listening and evidence-collecting and cogitating, you still have to make the call. It can't be pure science. The instincts will tip the answers one way or the other. But Cass Sunstein insists that there's a rejection of doctrinal filters. I don't know that it is possible to think without something like a "doctrinal filter." But maybe it's possible that Obama does -- or at least comes closer to unfiltered thinking than anyone else is likely to do.
The larger point is that Obama's departures from left-wing orthodoxy should not be understood as a betrayal of his own beliefs, or as a kind of "tacking to the center." Instead, they reflect something altogether different: an independence of mind, and a rejection of doctrinal filters, that we do not often see in candidates for public office.
“I thought of him much more as a colleague” than a student, said Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard for whom Mr. Obama worked. “I didn’t think of him as someone to send out on mechanical tasks of digging out all the cases.” Other students could do that, Professor Tribe added.Other students.
Long before the presidential race, some around him seemed to resent his ability to galvanize a following. “Bluebooking is not important for celebrities,” fellow students joked about him in the law review parody, referring to the tedious process of checking citations.That's for you other students.
He does not easily exult, despair or anger: to do so would be an indulgence, a distraction from his goals. Instead, they say, he separates himself from the moment and assesses.....Wow, the NYT used the middle name. Can we say Barack Hussein Obama now without raising the presumption that we're out to get him?
But with Barack Hussein Obama officially becoming the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday night....
There is little about him that feels spontaneous or unpolished, and even after two books, thousands of campaign events and countless hours on television, many Americans say they do not feel they know him. The accusations of elusiveness puzzle those closest to the candidate. Far more than most politicians, they say, he is the same in public as he is in private.This is the real Obama, then. There is no other. Some will say: Aha, I told you: empty suit. But I'm thinking: The 20th century is over. No more Freud and hippies. No more contempt for the repressed and delving into the subconscious and imprecations to let it all hang out. There is no subconscious. There is no it to hang out. The 21st century man has arrived. Reorient yourself for the future.
Starting in law school, Mr. Obama began pulling together a large cast of mentors, well-connected and civic-minded friends who rose in Chicago and Illinois politics along with him, including a spouse he thought was ideal.No, no, don't speculate about the substance of his marriage. That would be too 20th century. What you see is what it is.
“He loved Michelle,” said Gerald Kellman, Mr. Obama’s community organizing boss, but he was also looking for the kind of partner who could join him in his endeavors. “This is a person who could help him manage the pressures of the life he thought he wanted.”
If there is one quality that those closest to Mr. Obama marvel at, it is his emotional control. This is partly a matter of temperament...I told you: he's phlegmatic.
...they say, partly an effort by Mr. Obama to step away from his own feelings so he can make dispassionate judgments. “He doesn’t allow himself the luxury of any distraction,” said Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser. “He is able to use his disciplined mind to not get caught up in the emotional swirl.”No vortex for him.
It is not that Mr. Obama does not experience emotion, friends say. But he detaches and observes, revealing more in his books than he does in the moment. “He has the qualities of a writer,” Mr. Axelrod said. “I get the sense that he’s participating in these things but also watching them.”...Odd that the crowd got so emotional, when he was aloof. What were they looking for in him? And why did they think they saw it?
As a campaigner, Mr. Obama had to learn to sometimes let simple emotion rule. When Mr. Axelrod first devised “Yes We Can” as a slogan during Mr. Obama’s Senate campaign, the candidate resisted: it was a little corny for his taste. “That’s where the high-minded and big-thinking Barack came in,” said Peter Giangreco, a consultant to the Obama campaign. “His initial instincts were off from where regular people’s were.”
It's funny how the New York Times seems to think this article makes Obama look good, when it actually makes him sort of seem like a sociopath.
Or like Mr Spock.
But then, Mr Spock would never become a Democrat. Illogical, Captain.
You're so 20th century you can't help analyzing him even while commanding us to get over analyzing him.Ha ha. Yes. I will never get out of that place.
Me too. I found a Jungian twist that kind of fits (it's down at the end of this post.... What's interesting is that the "negative puer aeternus" has trouble ever making commitments. Obama made commitments to his family and (for a while) to his black and Christian identity, as if he knew he needed to be "grounded" even if it did not come naturally.Fascinating. Go over there and read the whole thing. Snippet:
John McCain, by contrast [to Obama's puer aeternus], is senex, the archetype of the "old man." A Jungian would say (annoyingly) that they "constellate" each other, that is, whenever one shows up it invokes the other.Spooky!
Republicans close to the campaign said that the top contenders remained the same three men who have been the source of speculation for weeks: former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and, possibly, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut.How truly bizarre it would be if Lieberman is a VP pick a second time. What is it about him that inspires this confidence? It must be strong indeed if the opposite party's candidate could consider him. Picking Lieberman would maximize the distraction from Obama. It would really shake things up now, wouldn't it?
It was unclear how seriously Mr. McCain was considering his good friend Mr. Lieberman, who favors abortion rights and whose selection could set off a revolt among delegates at the Republican National Convention next week in Minneapolis-St. Paul as well as a furious backlash among Christian conservatives, a crucial voting bloc of the Republican Party. But as recently as Tuesday, Mr. McCain was said to still be entertaining the idea of Mr. Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket in 2000.
[Some] Republicans said they suspected that whatever Mr. McCain’s personal views, his aides could be pushing Mr. Lieberman with reporters as part of a disinformation campaign to stir interest in the selection and to make it appear as if Mr. McCain, a longtime opponent of abortion, was open to all possibilities and was therefore more of an independent candidate.Yes, a crucial point must be that he's not a very good campaigner. He was terrible in the VP debate with Dick Cheney — and Dick Cheney was hardly even trying to be good. I was completely for Al Gore in 2000, and I was mystified to find myself suddenly open to the notion of voting for Bush. (I didn't.)
Some Republicans also said that Mr. Lieberman had not caught fire as a campaigner in 2000 and that he would alienate more voters, particularly evangelicals, than he would attract.
At 4:48 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, at the urging of Mrs. Clinton, the New York delegation cast its votes for Mr. Obama, and Mrs. Clinton called on the Democratic National Convention to end the roll call and nominate him by acclamation.Oh. I see. The crowd was chanting "Hillary, Hillary, Hillary." She made it happen like this. When no one was watching. How utterly surreal. This convention is all about the Clintons, isn't it? She dominated last night. She controls the nomination tonight. And the rest of the evening is the lead-up to Bill. How awful for Barack... in his moment of triumph.
“With eyes firmly fixed on the future in the spirit of unity, with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and country, let’s declare together in one voice, right here and right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president,” Mrs. Clinton said.
“I move that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by this convention by acclamation as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.”
The crowd in the Pepsi Center roared as one and then began to chant, “Hillary, Hillary, Hillary.”
WTF, indeed, Ann.Yes. Yes. Yes. The great state of Wisconsin is ... or I, here, am ... nostalgic for the old-style Americana of the political conventions of yore. I remember conventions where there was true excitement in the roll call. I remember 1968, when the conventioneers got overwhelmed by the protests outside and started singing "We Shall Overcome" and took down their vertical state-name signpost and rocked it in the horizontal position. That made me weep when I was 17.... Okay, I'm snapping out of that.
I first watched political conventions with my Irish grandfather, a union democrat. We watched the state-by-state nominating process, and he explained the importance of every state the the democracy of the process (an explanation with many comparative references to the "fookin' Russians").
The conventi, usualy [sic] a woman, would call the roll: The Greeeat Staaate of Aaaahlaskah!!!
And the chairman of that state's delegation would reply: The great State of Alaska, America's northernmost state, the second youngest state in our great union, the home of caribou, elk, moose and Denali National Park, the great State of Alaska casts its 4 electoral votes for the next president of the United States, Adalai Stevenson!!!"
The nominations were held in prime time because, after all, nominating a candidate was the purpose of the convention.
I wish it were so today. The most important part of the convention has been relegated to a perfunctory exercise to fill time before the prime time speechifyin' can begin.
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