And I am very happy about that. George Bush accepted the Republican nomination as expected (though I was hoping for some exciting developments here). He also gave a very long and a very boring speech in which he offered something for everybody, including working women! (they get flex time which, by the way, pays less), which didn't get much of an applause from the Republican faithfuls. The unborn were mentioned, something was said about the horrors of religious discrimination, Kerry was bashed, something was said in Spanish, God was implied to be on Bush's side and there was a lot of stuff about how all the things will now be done that were promised four years ago but were not done since. And then there was lots of war-talk, of course, and how everybody in the Middle East is very happy now. As I type this from memory some details may have been a little distorted. But I clearly remember a protester who got through somehow. So the president who vows to keep us safe can't keep his own Convention safe.
However, the well-known liberal rag called New York Times concludes as follows about the success of the RNC:
The predominant view in New York was that the Republicans had successfully inflicted some damage on Mr. Kerry, but to do so they had to spend considerable time on the attack and present a tough image to the viewing public before an election that will be decided by voters in the middle. Whether this success came at any cost will be determined later.
Interesting, isn't it? To see whether smears and lies and half-truths are more effective in determining the election results than the dislike of the way they were presented? But I suspect that the Republicans aren't trying for the undecideds anymore at all. They were speaking directly to the wingnuts and tried to make it sound unpleasant so that as few of the undecideds would bother to go out and vote at all. The wingnuts will come out in hordes, of course, so this is not a bad strategy for Rove to choose. We'll see if it works, though I hope it won't naturally. I am still relatively sane, and now I can stop listening to politicians for a while! Yes!