Boston Bacchanalia: Night #3

If Kerry wanted this convention to be buttoned down, disciplined, and something that wouldn’t scare away Main Street USA, would somebody please explain to me why Al Sharpton was given a prime-time speaking slot on day three? The man is personal and political anthrax. One of the kinder things he said about President Bush is that, “if [he] had selected the [Supreme] Court in 1954 [the Court that decided Brown], Clarence Thomas would have never got to law school." And Sharpton hates Thomas almost as much as he does Bush! Though Revrund Al did deal with the notion of hatred, sort of: “We went from unprecedented international support and solidarity on September 12, 2001, to hostility and hatred as we stand here tonight.” And we know from where that “hostility and hatred” spawned, don’t we?

Jesus, these people are making the entire state of Massachusetts into a divine lightning rod.

You just have to marvel at how the Boston Balker didn’t even suspect that Sharpton would blow off his restrictions on time and content. And here’s another dual point to ponder: if a political poison peddler like Al Sharpton will neither heed nor respect John Kerry, what in the ever lovin’ world is supposed to persuade anybody that he’ll be able to wave the magic diplowand and bring the Germans, French, and Russians bounding, puppy-like, to lavish financial and military assistance on us in Iraq? And if John Kerry is so tough, why couldn’t he have simply told Al – who won zippo delegates – to, in so many words, go pound sand?

What guy wouldn’t want to attend a lingerie summit with Jennifer Granholm? Damn, she is hot. If not for her foreign birth, Hillary would have a serious catfight on her hands in four years.

Why would George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and especially Michael Dukakis even be acknowledged at this shindig? Kerry must not believe in karma, that’s for sure.

Do you realize that for the Republicans to do the equivalent (citing past defeated challengers), they’d have to go back to Thomas Dewey to complete the trifecta?

Was anybody surprised that Clinton’s JCS, John Shalikashvili, showed up to endorse Kerry? And did anybody give a damn?

Lizzie Edwards may have stuck her foot in her mouth by endorsing the Radio City Raunchfest recently, but she certainly put Teraaaaaaysa’s “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I’M CHANNELING MARIE ANTOINETTE!” display to considerable, if not absolute, shame. It’s telling how a wife speaking at a political convention as a wife seems so novel with this bunch.

Okay, onto the main event of the night. As I listened to Li’l John speak, I had a sudden V-8 moment; and I don’t know why it didn’t hit me before – John Edwards is the real life Opie Taylor! Same twang, same barely-changed voice, same two Boston (sorry, Mt. Pilot…) telephone directories to stand on so he could see over the top of the podium. Or maybe it was an apple crate. Though given the image they were shooting for, it may have helped Opie if he’d ambled on stage in overalls, barefoot, with a fish pole and whistling that famous tune.

My gut feeling was that Edwards could help pull this convention out of the ditch into which the first two hideous nights sent it careening. And while he didn’t bomb by any means – in baseball terms I’d call it a stand-up double – the vapidity, and at times idiocy, of his remarks detracted seriously from the fabled “sunniness” with which they were delivered.

Let’s start with the most egregious example:

We will always use our military might to keep the American people safe, and we, John and I, we will have One...Clear...Unmistakable...Message...for al-Qaeda and these terrorists: You cannot run; you cannot hide; we will destroy you.

I tried to picture Osama bin Laden, whether watching from a cave, a comfortable billet in Tehran, or hell, listening to this squeaky sturm und drang and how he would react to it. And the only reason I failed is because I have no idea what kind, if any, sense of humor OBL has. Personally, if I were he, I’d still be convulsed in laughter. Watching this weak little man shake his fist in the face of America’s declared enemies was like Sheriff Andy running for mayor of Mayberry, and Opie stumping for his daddy by declaring that, “If elected, my pa will send deputy Barney Fife to bring La Cosa Nostra to its knees.” On the bright side, though, they could get Teddy Kennedy for the role of Otis the town drunk.

There is a rule of thumb in life, and especially in politics: if you gotta shout it, it probably isn’t so. Put another way, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney don’t have to run around blustering spittle-flecked threats because they’ve proven that there are fangs behind their words. Just ask yourself if Muammar Khaddafy would have voluntarily capitulated on his WMD program if the Bushies hadn’t chased Saddam Hussein into that spider hole. Personally, listening to the above Edwards rhetorical Viagra just brings back all of Clinton’s empty finger-wagging throughout the nineties as al Qaeda and Saddam and the mullahs and Kim jong-Il got stronger and bolder, more often than not with American help. And don’t forget that Opie, just like his “best friend forever,” played ginnip-ginnop with the Iraq war resolution and subsequent reconstruction funding bill.

I can just see Big Time, salivating for the veep debate.

This next quote is, if anything, even more choice:

You know for the last few months, John's been traveling around the country, talking about his positive optimistic vision for America, talking about his plan to move this country in the right direction. But what have we seen? Relentless negative attacks against John. So in the weeks ahead, we know what's coming, don't we? More negative attacks. Aren't you sick of it? They're doing all they can to take the campaign for the highest office in the land, down the lowest possible road.

“Positive, optimistic vision”? What “positive, optimistic vision”? What “plan”? Is there single signature stance that Kerry has (1) taken and (2) stuck with for longer than a week or two? Oh, he’s dabbled in a little wonkery here or there, but does anybody know what it is? If Kerry’s big problem is that “nobody knows who he is,” wouldn’t it help him to actually publicize this “positive, optimistic vision/plan”? And wouldn’t the partisan media be overjoyed to render its enthusiastic assistance in this endeavor?

Sean Tuffnell of NRO Financial did a little investigative poking around on the Kerry campaign website looking for something, anything, on Lurch’s position(s) on Social Security. After all, on Monday Clinton said that Kerry “has a good idea to save” the ancient entitlement. The next night Teddy “Foster Brookes” Kennedy slurringly echoed that claim.

I looked under issues to see if his plan was posted there. Unfortunately, his index of issues left me perplexed:

There were links to information about children and families, civil rights, the economy, education, energy, environment, health care, homeland security, national security, national service, rural America, science and technology, stronger communities, veterans, and women. Nowhere was there a link to Social Security, retirement security, or even seniors’ issues. Frustrated, I tried looking under economy, but found no mention of Social Security there either.

This is remarkable in two senses. First, that Kerry has an “issues index” that is so thoroughly invisible (not unlike the Dem party platform); and second, that Mr. French has nothing at all to say about Social Security other than what he has offered sporadically on the stump – which amounts to an abdicatory adherence to the actuarily untenable status quo. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that he has this “positive, optimistic vision/plan” because his surrogates say so. Kind of like the way the priests controlled the liturgy in the medieval Roman Catholic church. And of course, he served in Vietnam. Maybe he’ll be offered the lead in Apocalypse Now II now that Marlin Brando is dead.

And “relentless negative attacks against John”? Frankly, that’s arguably the most insulting thing that’s been said by anybody at this convention. Only difference is it isn’t just the President’s intelligence that is being denigrated. Though in a sense I guess this finally does give Dubya and Osama something in common besides genome and gender: being comically admonished as if they were brain-dead jurors in a big-money tort case. Man, I’m looking forward to the veep debate as much as Cheney must be.

And then Opie returned to familiar ground:

The truth is we still live in a country where there are two different Americas - one for all those people who have lived the American dream and don't have to worry, and another for most Americans, everybody else who struggle to make ends meet every single day. It doesn't have to be that way.

Well, I suppose that you could give Li’l John credit for not accusing “all those people who have lived the American dream” of having extracted it from the livers and spleens of the poor, downtrodden, and destitute. What I find so astonishingly anachronistic about it is that he doesn’t seem to recognize even the existence of the middle class. I mean, at least Kerry does when he falsely claims that it’s “shrinking”; going by the above rhetoric, Edwards appears lost in a sort of dark, dank, dreary, fog-cloaked, Dickensian world where a handful of people like…well, like him and Kerry live in luxury and opulence like Louis Winthorpe in Trading Places, while Everybody Else huddles around fitful fires on freezing street corners in a perpetual November, shivering, wailing forlornly, fighting over the occasional rat that strays too close to the ravenous, rag-clad hordes.

I mean, it’s not that Edwards isn’t a good pitchman, and heaven knows he must've spun such sobmongering stem-winders to many a jury, but this gimmick is just such overpowering bullshit, so many parsecs distant from any rational rendition of current American prosperity, that most listeners (what few there were of them) almost had to have absorbed this drivel, tampon-like, for quite a piece before it finally dawned that Li’l John was actually referring to them. Though I will give Hair, the Boy Follicle Wonder credit for not dragging his Bradyized kids out on stage dressed up as Tiny Tim.

Perhaps his rip-off of Dick Cheney’s 2000 speech “Hope is on the way” – best sums up this quaint, crazy-quilt classism. Cheney, of course, referred to something tangible and specific – the restoration of respect for, and adequate funding and equipping of, the U.S. military. I really have no idea what Opie was promising, or even to whom he was speaking, since the closest impoverished ragamuffins presumably get to a television set is the cardboard carton they call home, and since “the rich” are mostly Democrats like himself and Thurston. Perhaps this is simply noveau aristocratic disdain that conflates “struggle” with “working for a living,” which neither member of the Dem ticket, and quite a few of the delegates, ever have to do again if they so choose. That would help explain why their retributive tax increases will be deflected to the middle class. Again. Which would explain why Edwards tries to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Rich Lowry’s observation says it all: “And this is the guy from whom John Kerry is borrowing his message!”

Instead of pulling the Boston Bacchanalia out of the ditch, Edwards’ address seemed to fit into the archipelago of decliningly quality speeches that began at the apex with Clinton’s on Monday, tailed off with Barack Obama’s on Tuesday, and then descended to Opie’s decent but far from overpowering offering last night. Which is, of course, the precise opposite of how a convention is supposed to unfold. Rather than building to a soaring climax with the nominee’s moment in the national spotlight, Kerry’s speech – said to be an hour long and more bereft of gravitas or content than cotton candy laced with Sugar Twin – seems destined to either “introduce to the American people” the John Kerry his handlers don’t want them to see, or become hopelessly lost in the surrounding staticky Bushophobic hiss that has drenched this quadrennial oddball reunion.

Probably a little of both.