The Wizard and I

I sat though all , ALL six, seven hours of Donald Trump's GOP convention acceptance speech. Introduced  by one of his brood of children ,  (who btw, the media can not stop fauning all over, I do believe they are the first offspring of a candidate to ever speak in public! )

The text of the speech was leaked way early in the day and a couple of the reports that I read had me a little bit on edge, suggesting that a tsunami of a talk was headed our way. White knuckling it, I sat down to watch the start and made it about thirty seconds. Night Four in Cleveland : Making America One, started off with Jerry Faldwell, Jr. Click - take Koda for a walk.

I had it on in the background until it was time from Trump to come on. Like I said, his daughter inrtoduced him by giving a full throated , bold Democratic Party speech, line for line. What? Lily Leadbetter, What? Free Child Care.. on and on. ( also, a wind machine keeping her limp blond locks moving... really ) Then it was time. It did not take long for my nerves to be calmed a little bit.

Loud, orange and scary - not understanding he was playing to the television audience not an airplane hager, Mr Trump declared it MIDNIGHT IN AMERICA, and " he and he alone " can save us. Jesus and The Batman rolled up into one.

David Brooks picked up on that

from the NYT

THE DARK KNIGHT

So many problems a long totally disconnected list machine gunned out of his mouth, seaways are for low energy candidates, just barrel on to the next one, volume at 11 , who needs to breath. BUT, all fixed so so quickly. The killer gangs of illegals behind every corner, gone by the time the inaugural parade it finish. ISIS, gone in a real hurry, a real one. Racial discourse ( or as white people call it, Law and Order ) might take till Wednesday evening, tops. MASSIVE TAX CUTS ( stop me if you have heard this one ) and MASSIVE SPENDING INCREASES ( planes, trains, automobiles ) It was manna from heaven acid raining down from the coal darkened skies of America.

In one wild moodswing he promised to protect the ELLLL, GHEEEE, BEEEE, TEEEEE, CUEEEE citizens of America from radical Islam. AND then congratulated himself and the convention for having the courage and strength to say those five little letters LGBTQ ( yeah, it is queer or questioning - you can stretch the letters out for as long as you want, but only angry new gays use anything other than lgbt ) So, protect me from ISIS but not from the leader of the Christian Talliban that  you picked as your running mate. Protect me from radicle Islam , but do not protect me from the most anti gay party platform ever presented. Isis cutting off my head bad, getting fired from my job for being gay, not so much .

 It was a very very strange Republican speech in some ways and in some ways not at all. After daring to say gay people existed he then went on to throw that same Christian Talliban all sorts of red meat including lifting the Johnson era ban on Churches openly politicking , Judges like Scalia etc.

The bottom line is this brought no one new into the fold, and we are still going at this basically 45% to 45%, Hillay's turn at bat next week. It should be much less painful , so maybe I can do some live blogging , or something... 

We may come back to this in the morning, or I will at least post some more links etc.