Dw.: Well, John McCain is in a pickle now, isn’t he? Last week he chose a running mate that would satisfy certain weak sectors of his ticket - the Christian Right, young people and women. One day after Sarah Palin’s speech, she is suddenly the party’s superstar. It helps him in the polls, but now he has two people to wrestle the spotlight from: Barack Obama and his own VP choice.

Jon: I think McCain needs to back away from the nastiness of Wednesday evening. Mitt, Rudy and Sarah were so over the top, and the crowd in the hall was so angry, that the long-term impact might be an implosion of the Republican Party brought on by its own misplaced victimhood and unearned condescension. McCain needs to offer something different tonight.

Ted: This speech will tell us a lot about how much McCain wants to be president, and how low he will stoop to get it. So far, he has kowtowed to his advisors and party regulars, who steered him away from picking his top choices for VP (Thompson and Lieberman) in order to go with Palin.

Dw.: Tonight’s speech has to be a winner. By even the standards of the conservative pundits, Obama’s was one for the ages. McCain needs to bring the impact, and badly. The question is how he’ll approach the task. Will he rise above the verbal flogging his compatriots inflicted over the last two and a half days, addressing the audience as a statesman? Or will he sink to a barrage of easy cliches, distortions, and the kibbles and bits the red states lap up so willingly?

Ready, steady, go…!

McCain takes the stage…

Dw: Heeeeere’s Johnny!

Jon: What was with that intro video? Very Leni Riefenstahl, with the voiceover and the flagwaving. And now McCain enters, and that huge spotlight is terribly Triumph of the Will. (more…)

Dw. Dunphy: I thought I’d start things off tonight with a joke: So … Judas, Benedict Arnold, and the dude from Raiders of the Lost Ark who gets the spikes through his face walk into a bar. They see Joe Lieberman, turn around and leave, saying, “Shit, they’ll let anyone in here these days” … Well, it ain’t funny, but it is original.

Ted Asregadoo: He’s here ’til Thursday, ladies and gentlemen!

Jon Cummings: Try the red meat! The Republicans are having a special.

9:40 p.m. EDT: Laura Bush emerges to introduce her absent hubby…

Dw.: Laura seems to be having trouble with the TelePrompTer.

Jon: Is our children learning?

Ted: I feel like taking a nap.

Jon: Get your ass up! If I can sit through this, you can.

Dw.: I speak for all of us when I say this is a sacrifice for the good readers of Popdose.

Jon: Here is Laura’s “straight talk” about the achievements of hubby’s administration: 1. No Child Left Behind (enacted with more help from Democrats than anyone else, never fully funded by Bush, too reliant on standardized tests, school districts nationwide despise it); 2. Supreme Court justices Alito & Roberts (selling the populace down the river to big business, ready to gut Roe v. Wade on a moment’s notice); 3. Faith-based initiatives (even the former director of the program says the Bushies were pandering, then disrespectful to church groups); 4. The African AIDS initiative (hard to argue with this funding, though the policy behind it reeks of Christian-right asininity – and Laura’s “before” statistic that only 50,000 Africans were receiving treatment in 2001 is a steaming pile of horseshit); 5. Afghanistan & Iraq “living in freedom” (millions of them might beg to differ – if you can hear the women’s muffled voices beneath their burkas); 6. Having “kept the American people safe” (hahahahahahaha).

And heeeeeeere’s Georgie…live via satellite… (more…)

It’s hard to know exactly what to write in this space today, because as of this writing it’s difficult to know what form this week’s Republican National Convention will take. To begin with, news reports Sunday night suggested that Monday’s activities in St. Paul would be severely curtailed by the landfall of Hurricane Gustav, perhaps limited to formalities including an official opening, report from the credentials committee and adoption of the party’s platform.

These GOP moves certainly are prudent, from both a governing perspective (George Bush and Dick Cheney have no business abandoning their posts during such a crisis, a lesson they’ve thankfully learned by now) and a political perspective (a slate of right-wing hits on Barack Obama would be profoundly inappropriate on a night when the homes and livelihoods of millions are endangered, as would the sight of Bush and John McCain partying through another Category 4 hurricane).

The net impact of such a throttling-back of the usual partisan festivities is unknown. On the one hand, Republicans will be unable to get started with what should be the main point of this convention, to introduce to the nation the almost completely unknown VP selection Anita Bryant – excuse me, Sarah Palin. On the other hand, McCain and other GOP operatives are not-so-quietly thanking their lucky stars that they won’t have to spend an evening “celebrating” the Bush/Cheney administration on national TV.

Depending on Gustav’s strength and the extent of devastation it wreaks, the second night of the convention also may be pared down. Tuesday, unofficially, was Hatchet Night, the evening during which the long knives were most likely to be drawn on the Obama/Biden ticket; scheduled speakers include keynoter Rudy Giuliani as well as Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson and Tom Ridge (each of whom, notably, is without steady employment at the moment). This is the evening on which Gustav might inflict the greatest damage on the Republicans, because this lineup of speakers was the most likely to fling large, lying chunks of fetid meat into the baying, rabid audience. That task, under less somber circumstances, would doubtless be the second-most important of the entire confab. (more…)