John McCain made his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and others watched it so you didn’t have to. Some of them even liveblogged it.
Shakesville: Petulant ( video and speech transcript), Melissa (initial and later summations)
Pandagon: Jesse Taylor (liveblogging, and later reaction)
Obsidian Wings: publius’ thought the speech “biographical and substance free”, while Hilzoy runs McCain/Obama convention speech comparisons, examining what they do not what they say and the me-I-me-me-me aspects of both speeches.
Salon: Glenn Greenwald has two posts full of disgust at the way that the GOP turns the presidential elections into another iteration of culture wars and personality assassination every four years, and despair at the way that the Dems let them get away with it through fear of a negativity backlash.
Emily Douglas at RH Reality Check.
Ezra Klein notes that an elegiac tone to Palin’s and the other Republican speeches about McCain
Nowhere did we hear of the great things John McCain would do, Instead, we heard, over and over, of the agonies John McCain endured. The presidency was presented tonight as if it were the Medal of Honor, or a purple heart. As if it is only a quirk of our political process that stops us from simply finding the longest serving prisoner of war and gifting him the keys to the office.
Ezra liveblogged McCain’s speech, then sums up something that others also noticed:
Of course, you must say this much: McCain’s recounting of his experiences as a prisoner of war remain powerful. But that was 40 years ago. He has now been campaigning for president for the better part of a decade. He needs more than a story. He needs a vision.
Yet tonight’s speech was all about him. The policies are his qualities, the vision is his story, the vice president is his understudy. For all that he mocks Obama for being “the one,” it is McCain who has rested the weight of a presidential candidacy atop his person. He is skilled at deflecting that perception, recasting one man’s candidacy as an expression of every man’s patriotism. But the common denominator in these humble asides remains McCain himself.
Categories: culture wars, media, Politics
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My mother and some friends being teachers, I heard mostly of the talk of education. Apparently he both was very supportive of vouchers and insulted the hell out of the teachers unions…which means that unless you have a teacher who’s very strongly into ID or is rabidly anti-abortion, they will be not voting McCain. Obama’s insistence on keeping No Child Left Behind has irritated a lot of teachers, but McCain’s comments have alienated most of the primary education voting bloc.
Just read this over at Eschaton: the Eagle Forum Alaska blog that published their 2006 gubernatorial questionnaire where some of Sarah Palin’s responses were a little wacko has taken that post down.
It’s still cached, of course, and I’ve saved it to my hard drive both as an HTML file and as a screensave image. I suggest others do the same to ensure that it doesn’t get MemoryHoled: please feel free to download the screenshot.
Will do and repost.
Perhaps more amazing is former Bush speechwriter David Frum on Sarah Palin: “I am pleading with my fellow conservatives: Please demand more and better knowledge before you commit yourselves to a political leader.” (via Political Wire)
And I did a number on that HTML. Please feel free to sort it, tig or Lauredhel.
Isn’t a rape victim and innocent? Why should she be forced to carry the child of her rapist. I swear the more I read about Palin the less I like her/
She’s a straight down the line Republican religious conservative, because McCain has given up on reaching the middle ground of moderates and independent. She’s there to rally the base and get those votes out for him.
Both McCain and Palin have a strong individualist story behind their candidacies. While there is a significant group who glorify that individualism (especially if they can use that maverick word some more), there are lots of us look at rampant individualism with suspicion, because what does it mean in terms of connexions and understanding of other people’s goals and insecurities?
McCain has been a Beltway party-line man for over 20 years, yet he’s supposed to represent change from Bush? How does that work? Palin, on reading from the Mudflats blog who has been blogging Alaskan politics since May, pledged transparency and honesty in government, yet is on record as lying about polar bears, selling jets on E-bay, the bridge to nowhere, earmarked funds in general, her executive experience as Mayor (she had a paid administrator to do all the work) and more. Despite the claims that she was fully vetted, it appears that she did withhold information on her teenage daughter’s pregnancy from the McCain team, and they apparently either didn’t know or care that news that she was vulnerable to impeachment was circulating weeks before the selection. More typical Republican party-line mendacity, this time wrapped up in more guns & God than ever before.