21 July 2016
Ted’s payback, Newt’s fear mongering, Pence’s bland acceptance
Will Trump’s acceptance speech tonight echo Nixon’s in 1968? Trump’s tone and words might differ from Nixon’s, but Trump already is proclaiming himself the guardian of law ‘n order in a manner reminiscent of Nixon’s successful exploitation of that theme 48 years ago. Nixon’s speech (download PDF for printing) was masterful as well as diabolical.
Pence’s speech was received well, but as a vice presidential acceptance speech it paled in comparison to both Hubert Humphrey’s “But not Senator Goldwater” speech, (9.7 MB PDF) in 1964, and Al Gore’s “It is time for them to go” speech in 1992.
Pence was upstaged by Newt Gingrich, who argued that putting Hillary Clinton in the White House greatly increases the probability that terrorists will use an atomic bomb to vaporize an American city, and by Ted Cruz, still Mr. Unlikeable, and still unhappy at being called “Lying Ted” by Donald Trump. Cruz ended his payback speech by urging Americans to vote their conscience, infuriating Trump, and angering some delegates to the point where Cruz’s wife, in a banana republic moment, had to be escorted from the convention for her own safety. [Note to D.P. You were right, Cruz, not Newt, delivered the best speech of the night.]
Finding a schedule of convention speakers isn’t easy. After lamenting on Twitter my struggle to find a simple HTML page or PDF with the names of the speakers and the times they were scheduled to speak, the Montana Republican Party quickly Tweeted back that there’s an RNC convention app (scroll down to How to Watch) with that information. I appreciate the response and help. Unfortunately, I’m an old fogy who uses a desktop computer and an ancient Macbook laptop. I don’t need an app. I just need a simple schedule. (I've been watching the convention on my laptop while sitting outside in the fresh evening air, occasionally Tweeting out an acerbic or snarky observation. I’ll do so again tonight.)
Republican platform. It’s available as a PDF. And it’s one of the most radical political manifestos ever adopted by a major American political party, reports Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:
The GOP Platform makes several highly controversial claims about the nature of natural rights. For one thing, it claims to understand what these rights are with a great deal of granularity. Beyond the right to bear arms, the platform names the “right to devote resources to whatever cause or candidate one supports” (i.e. the right to spend money to influence elections), the right of private organizations to “set their own membership standards” free from anti-discrimination laws, and the “freedom of Americans to act in accordance with their religious beliefs” often when those beliefs call for defiance of the law, as examples of rights that are “not given to us by the government but are rights we inherently possess.”
Then comes the Platform’s single most radical line. In addition to claiming that the First Amendment protects natural rights to spend unlimited sums of money on elections and to engage in religiously motivated discrimination, the Platform includes this remarkable statement: “The government cannot use subsequent amendments to limit First Amendment rights.”
This is nothing less than a repudiation of the idea that judges and lawmakers are bound by the Constitution’s written text.
Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech. The official story, which has the ring of truth, is that after Melania rejected the draft written by former Bush 43 speechwriters, she received help from an in-house writer at one of Donald Trump’s businesses. Over the telephone, Melania read excerpts from Michelle Obama’s speech, after which the in-house writer incorporated the excerpts into Melania’s speech — and then failed to run the speech through a plagiarism checker. That failure is inexplicable. I doubt it will happen again in Trump’s campaign.
The final outcomes: (1) unnecessary embarrassment for Melania, (2) no impact on how anyone will vote, (3) proof that some Republicans learned nothing from John Walsh’s experience, and (4) increased sales and use of plagiarism checkers.