Muzzles, Botox, and baffle gab.

Zell Miller turned in a sharp performance on "Meet the Press" yesterday:

Oh, the Democrats have changed. This time, it's the Democrats who have the party of division and diversion. Have you ever seen anything like this Democratic convention? We've been going to them for a long time. This is the first time I've ever seen the speakers issued muzzles before they went up to the speaking platform. I mean, you have to give them a C+, I guess, for discipline, but it was a convention that was completely deceptive in every way. Somebody back in Georgia said that it's the Botox convention: cosmetically enhanced. ...



I found [Kerry's] speech amazingly evasive. It was the same gobbledegook, same baffle gab that you have always heard from John Kerry. He said that he had a plan for Iraq, but then he never got around to telling you what that plan was. He said that he was going to increase troops by 40,000, and special ops, he was going to double, but I'm not going to send them to Iraq. I don't know exactly where he stands on these things still.

Miller is an excellent speaker, and he seems to represent a style of thinking characteristic of his region of the South. Some of the things he says sound elegant, but--unlike the quotes I've set out above--don't ring true at all to me. These two things jumped out at me:

[H]ow can a person say that they are for American values and for the American family whenever they vote or not vote but oppose an amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage as a union between man and woman?



How can a person ... talk about the glory of Old Glory [when] they voted three times .... against an amendment that would have protected the flag against abuse?

"Ego, I don't know the meaning of the term."

The NYT interviews Ralph Nader. He shows his contempt for the Democratic Party ("decadent") and its little show last week: "This is repressed conformity." Of himself, he says: "Ego, I don't know the meaning of the term."



The article includes a nice picture of Michael Moore and Bill Maher, on Maher's HBO show, on their knees, begging Nader to drop out. Nader is laughing.

A giddy Bush.

Bush on C-Span at a rally in Pittsburgh. He's loose and confident and a bit giddy:

I wish Laura were here. Man, did I luck out when she said "yes." She's a great wife and a wonderful, wonderful person and a wonderful First Lady. Listen, I'm gonna give ya some reasons why you need to put me back in office. Perhaps the most important reason is so that Laura will have four more years as the First Lady.

Now why is Bush saying this now, right at the top of his speech and with such enthusiasm? My guess is that he means to say, implicitly: I'm more of a man than John Kerry. I have a great wife who loves me and I love her. You don't want that "shove it" lady in the White House, now, do you?

Struggling to listen to Kerry.

Chris Wallace interviewed John Kerry and John Edwards on Fox News Sunday. Here's a snippet that had us crying out in exasperation.

KERRY: I think this administration has dropped the ball on homeland security. I think they are now moving to catch up, but what America wants is leadership that's ahead of the curve, which doesn't have to be told by an independent commission, which they, incidentally, fought to prevent--they didn't want this commission--they tried to slow walk this commission. ...



EDWARDS: We're gonna stay focused on what we're going to do for America ...



WALLACE: Senator Kerry, in your convention speech ... you said, let's be optimists, not opponents. Let's take the high road. But in your speech, you said, the President misled us into war. You said that he's playing politics ...



KERRY: No, I said I will never mislead us into war.



WALLACE: Well, the implication was, this President did. In fact, you said he did.



KERRY: I said he did -- correct -- and I have said it several times. But in the speech I didn't. You're quoting my speech ...

Kerry makes this last ridiculous point pedantically, as if it's at the very core of what really matters. We were going "huh?" and then laughing.

WALLACE: Right.



KERRY: I didn't say that. I said I will never mislead us.



WALLACE: But ... you don't disagree with the premise that you have said that he ... that he misled us.



KERRY: Well, all Americans understand what's happened now.



WALLACE: That's not my question, anyway, my question is, there's that and you also said that you won't play politics with the Constitution. Implication: this President has played politics...



KERRY: Correct.



WALLACE: ... with the Constitution. Isn't that what John Edwards calls the negative politics of the past?



KERRY: No, those are comparisons of choices about the values that we bring to politics. You know, you hear a lot of talk about values in America. I think that the choices that you make in your policies reflect your values, and the things that you try to champion. John and I want health care for all Americans. That's a value. John and I believe that you shouldn't talk about no child left behind and then not fund the education system so that no child is left behind. That's a value. Under our plan, we're going to fund education, we're going to respect educators, teachers, we're going to bring our schools up in a positive and affirmative way. They're choosing to do one thing, and we have an affirmative choice. Obviously, we have to talk about the comparative choices. That's not name-calling. That's not petty and small. We have a big idea of health care for all Americans. We have a big idea for young people to afford to be able to go to college, where tuitions are going up. We have a big idea for restoring America's reputation in the world and fighting a more effective war on terror. To compare how we will fight the war on terror is the center of this campaign and that's what Americans want to know.

I was alternately laughing and groaning throughout this meandering evasion. How many times and at what length are we going to have to listen to Kerry chide Bush for going negative and then self-servingly elaborate why all of his criticisms of Bush don't count as negative?



UPDATE: Liberty Corner aptly asks "What on earth does any of that have to do with the Consitution?" I'd say that Kerry was implicitly substituting the less specific question: aren't you going negative? Which he, of course, proceeded to evade anyway. And he was such a stickler a moment before that assertion that the President had mislead us into war was not in the convention speech (though he's said it elsewhere many times and the convention speech implied it).

Teresa Heinz Kerry: "It was pretty surreal."

"This Week with George Stephanopoulos" had a clip of Stephanopoulos interviewing Teresa Heinz Kerry the day after John Kerry's convention speech:

How did you feel about last night?



It was pretty surreal.



Surreal?



Well, you know, you're standing ... until the balloons started dropping, and the kids started playing balloons, and I said, okay, it's playtime now. But until then, it's kind of like happening to somebody else.

What's surreal is that the wife of the candidate would answer that question that way. Stephanopoulos was giving her an opportunity to help her husband's cause by saying something like "He did a fantastic job." Instead of talking at all about how he did, she interpreted the question literally, as if everyone just wants to know about her inner emotional life. And even then, one might have thought that she would have expressed her feelings in terms of her pride in her husband or her nervousness for him or her love and support, but instead, she came out with the hippie's "It was pretty surreal" and nothing more. Prodded to explain, she rambled on about balloons. Not a word about her husband. I give her credit for honesty: she does not try to figure out what is required of her and substitute appropriate answers. But I get the sense that she can scarcely bring herself to care about all the events swirling about her.



Here's a second interchange with Stephanopoulos:

Coming into this convention over half the country said they didn't know that much about John Kerry. What do you think is the big thing they learned this week?



Well, you know, I was saying a little earlier that John finally got a forum where he could be at his best, which is thoughtful, allow passion to come in, allow his ideas to come forth. You know, how often in life do you get that kind of attention and space and time? So it was a very good moment for him.

There, Heinz Kerry doesn't interpret the question literally, or isn't able to think of a "big thing" that people learned about Kerry. Her answer, delivered somnambulently, consists of little more than an acknowledgement that Kerry did have a chance to give a big speech. He "got a forum" where he "could" do a few things, where he had everyone's attention. Well, did he do anything worth noting?



She seems crushed by the boredom of it all.

The template is bugging me.

I'm disgusted with my Blogger template again. It's so unappealing! Please bear with me if I fool around with it again.



UPDATE: Okay, here I am trying to use Minima again. I'd tried it a while back but had trouble with photos lapping into the sidebar. I think I spotted the place in the code to fix that. This template is less obtrusive than the old one. My main complaint is that the subtlety of the template makes the Blogger ads so glaring. Why doesn't Blogger let us pay to get rid of them!

Demoncratic.

A while back I typoed "Demoncratic" for "Democratic" when writing about the convention. Now, the New York Times, of all newspapers, is comparing the Democratic Convention to the assembly of the fallen angels in "Paradise Lost." The source of the comparison is Milton scholar Pitt Harding:

When the devils convene in Pandemonium, a hall even more chaotic than the FleetCenter, their base is energized with rage against the militarist they blame for unfairly defeating them and ruling dictatorially. There are deep divisions in the party - some want all-out war with God, others are doves - but Satan unites them ....