I’ve had my fill of rhetoric, bloviating, misrepresenting, pontificating, obfuscating, facts obliterating, patronizing, insult-flailing, empty chair parodying, misspent funds, half truths and generally being expected to take focus group tested soundbytes as gospel.
Now, my folks raised my siblings and me to pay a little attention to the world around us and it is a habit I maintained and part of that is keeping an eye peeled on the national political conventions when the time comes. I don’t think they’ve really mattered in a long time, beyond being glorified pep rallys. No big platform fights, candidate revelations or things of that ilk have come along in a generation or more.
But occasionally you get those moments that are fun to watch, just for the sake of watching. In the early years of the West Wing tv show, there was a great scene where fictional communications director Toby Ziegler was battling with network chiefs about how to cover the now predictable conventions. Ziegler got the best line about “what can be better than our leaders talking to us.” Far too often they’ve been talking down to us, insulting voters short term memories with just one “fact” or conveniently forgetting the easily proveable reality.
The real winner in cases like that aren’t the voters, but guys like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert who probably got more than a week’s worth of material from Tampa and likely reaping the motherload from the shenanigans in Charlotte.
People are sniping over stupid things like the move of the President’s speech from a nearby Football stadium to the convention hall, from what Paul Ryan did and didn’t say correctly, what the President said about getting stuff done when he was first elected to whatever point Clint Eastwood was trying to make with the empty chair.
About the only thing abundantly clear is the decline in our listening skills.
These pep rallies aren’t getting much actually accomplished, but as was pointed out Tampa plays Carolina on Sunday. Think the winner is predicting the election?
Can we just vote now?
Mike's Pub 