Pennsylvania Anarchoblogs

hippie bluegrass. the sound is remarkably traditional. every player here is just a master, though they might be under-rehearsed as a unit. richard greene is the best fiddler i ever saw: astonishing: halfway between squaredance and hard bop. but bill keith, grisman, clarence white: they are all entirely fundamental.

i went back and actually watched the full 1992 buchanan speech, embedded below. everyone might think the republican party is moving right, but this speech would be unimaginable this year. he just goes straight at gay rights, for example. it's quite disturbing from this angle. it's also remarkably gracious to bush, a model of the heal-the-party genre.

however, it is a remarkable text and a remarkable performance. this was one of the few times in this era that the speechwriter emerged from behind the curtain. certainly buchanan had minted priceless phrases for agnew and nixon. here he issues an incredible string of alliterative aphorisms. and he wrote them all himself: that's why he delivers them with such ownership and conviction. i'm sure obama is capable of writing a speech; i don't know how frequently he does. they certainly have that collaborative feel these days: written by committee, though no doubt a better committee than romney's. we'll see next week.

to a large extent, the american presidency is an expressive office, and to a large extent the expression consists of words, though of course it is multi-dimensional. but the words are too rarely his own, so the role and the person come apart in a disturbing way: a form of pervasive inauthenticity.

i guess the leftish consensus this morning is that eastwood was 'disrespectful.' this is the president of the united states. i think it was funny and actually kind of deft. he had obama cussing him (eastwood) out; he didn't cuss obama out. but the cult of political leadership needs to be deflated like that constantly. we do not have to be mere subordinates. let's say sean penn or someone was doing that with regard to bush or cheney or something. would that be bad and disrespectful to the office of the president of the united states? god i hope so.

it's incomprehensible to me that people think that was a good speech. but maybe they just don't have faith in their own actual impression. like david gergen last night; he's all like 'very solid. he did what he needed to do.' then he starts pointing out all the dimensions of failure. people are very focused on playing it safe. 

'relateable' has made its way from sophomore girls to everywhere all the time. i am against it, on the grounds that that 'relate' needs the preposition ('to'). so it sounds very wrong: your need 'relatable-to,' which would itself be a nightmare. for that matter 'relate' - as in 'i relate' - was like a seventies fad, and it's not itself my favorite usage. 'connect' is better. but if you have to, i would not say 'mitt romney is not relateable,' i would say people find it difficult to relate, or rather connect, to him. or people don't like him.

11:06 there was an excellent moment when ryan described twenty-somethings, living again in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at faded obama posters and wondering what they can do with their lives. really, it was quite an excellent and devastating speech. i would probably even go read the text.

11:01 'our rights come from nature and god' again. what does 'nature' do here? it must have something to do with something he believes. but what, exactly? or maybe it's just an off appeal to the concept of natural right.

11:00 even the tribute to romney seems heartfelt. geez. giving some religion now. he's got this arena in his palm.

10:56 this is really taking off. nice writing in this speech, actuallly. 'what matters is not the economy that obama inherited, and it's not the one he envisions. it's the one we're living.' and he's really giving this free enterprise and anti-dependency thing a nice runout. so, so much better than romney. 

10:54 rice and ryan, among many others, accuse obama of weakness in foreign affairs, and they say that under a romney administration people will know when the rise up against oppressive diictators and demand freedom, america is with them. i actually would think obama deserves some credit in this regard, though i really wish he would take it out on bashar.

10:50 as he's paying tribute to his mom, his daughter goes over and hugs grandma. lord that is a lucky piece of choreography. cutest kiddies since obama.

10:47 ryan's dad always says that you can part of the problem or part of the solution. his dad was eldridge cleaver.

10:45 he's ragging on obama and allies' claim that his basic problem is not communicating well enough. ryan only had to roll his eyes a little on that one. obama's problem is that he's not cloaking the thing effectively in a cloud of jive, and ours is that we're not good enough listeners? (that's a paraphrase.)

10:43 he's definitely picking up steam, and he's relatively gently brutalizing obama. but he is twisting the frigging knife. this is a very good model for their rhetoric going forward.

10:41 he's good though swift on medicare, bringing in his grandma with alzheimer's and his mom the florida retiree. medicare is a promise and we will keep that promise, &c.

10:38 the reps are having a good convention; relatively compelling figures, and certainly plenty to complain about. there should be a bounce. how much depends on how romney does tomorrow night. but i wouldn't expect him to metamorphose into someone else before then.

10:36 i think he's quite nervous. stumbling a bit an can't find a rhythm yet. but the approach is relatively compelling and slightly specific; nice attack on the stimulus, which 'wasn't just spent and wasted, but borrowe, spent, and wasted."

10:32 ryan's dad was a lawyer. this is a problem because he didn't start with nothing. but he made up for it by dying, i suppose. he finished in nothing.

10:30 ryan fucked up his first line. 'i am honored to for vice president of the united states.' i'm kind of glasd i've never spoken to a full arena and a television audience of millions. i'd be pretty nerve-wracked.

10:18 when she was little girl, she carried a .357 magnum. new mexico has a pretty kick-ass governor, i guess. probably she's strapped right now, in case bono shows after all. either way, she's throwing down in a distinctive manner. i don't think i'd seen her before.

10:17 susana martinez's parents started with nothing. imagine that!

10:14 condi, too, hardly bothered to build up romney. everybody, from every wing, has terrible misgivings.

10:11 'the crisis in k-12 education is a threat to our future," etc. well, that there sentence could have produced at any time since the early sixties. it's been a half-century-long crisis so far. we must do something, but we won't. get over it. give up. you can't force people to learn. i guess you could grab a new fad.

10:10 she's attacking the anti-immigrant wing.

10:05 i wish i could take all this deficit stuff seriously. as many have said, you can't sit there talking about tax cuts and increased military spending and have any credibility on deficits. i don't believe they'd cut anything, except maybe a symbolic ax on the nat endowment for the humanities or something. that neither of these parties has any actual commitment to putting the budget in order is what really led to the tea party, and you might see the resurgence, expecially if romney is elected.

9:57 it's hard not to like condi rice. i'm not sure why, exactly. if she were the veep candidate, romney would win, perhaps by substantial margins.

9:53 huck is paying tribute to and quoting bono. i don't think u2 would play this convention, or else they wouldn't have turned to the lead singer of night ranger. however, if u2 was playing the transitions, i'd turn the channel, as the extremely impressive lightshow flashes and bono bellowed. huck didn't really hit the social issues: no doubt instructed in the wake of akin.

9:49 'i care less about where mitt romney takes his family to church, and more about where he takes the country.' notice that this does not entail that huck doesn't have serious misgivings about where mitt takes his family to church.

9:47 huck's parents apparently told him not to wait for 'uncle sugar to feed, lead, and bleed' him. actually a pretty good line. 

9:41 huckabee just said he heard a horrible noise from he next hotel room: debbie wasserman-schultz practicing her speech for the dnc. damn, son. though i can see how dws might profoundly irritate someone like huck. he's put that famous weight back on.

9:37 well i lost that big santorum entry. but one thing about santorum: almost unqiquely he does not seem like an egomaniac. pawlenty, christie, mcdonnell: they basically just gave their own stump speeches, told their little canned autobiographies. all that really matters to them is themselves, which is one reason that the anarchist approach is plausible: otherwise you basically get guys like that. pawlenty is doing a bit more for romney, though: "he's smart, gracious, and wise." er.

9:30 tim pawlenty's up now. man they have whole line in bashing biden.

wow i guess there is no way to get it back. no idea what happened. i guess i'm giving up, or maybe i'll start up again. damn.

whoa i just lost the whole post of tonight's convention string. trying to figure out what happened.

8:25 rick santorum, who's being interviewed on pbs, hates mitt romney, he says he has urged him to loosen up. "people want to like you," santorum says he told romney when they met after the primary campaign. "show people who you are." he just compared romney to kerry, gore, and dukakis as stiff, machine-like technocrats, which is apt. but that is not the sort of thing you expect an eminent republican to say. then he says that people need to connect to the pres, etc. really shockingly real. santorum would have had terrible issue-type problems in a general election, and 'war on women' would be a constant rhetorical bludgeon. but in many ways, or all ways except that, he would have been a much stronger candidate than romney. he'd have far more enthusiam from his side of the spectrum. he could run, as he kept saying, against obamacare, as romney cannot. and he's just a far far more sincere, principled, and human-seeming person.

8:03 hey it's john mccain. boy he ran a miserable campaign in 2008. certainly the most straight-up militaristic mainstream american politician. first mention i've heard of syria, and i admire his call to intervene. i must say, the idea that mccain represents the same political party as the pauls just shows you how entirely incoherent our political spectrum is. he trusts mitt romney, at the mention of whose name the crowd half-heartedly simulates enthusiasm.

8:01 i kind of like the whole frame of individualism vs. collectivism. and my view is that collectivism is just fearsomely wrong. i just wish 'individualism' meant something more than $$ to people.

7:47 oh hell it's the bushes on video. i've been trying to forget.

7:42 now he's running through the basic libertarian catechism. "we must never trade our liberty for any fleeting promise of security." getting through the mitt endorsement with non-palpabe insincerity.

7:41 staring at the camera and jabbing his finger: "mr. president, we will not allow you to bankrupt this great nation." then he says that defense spending has got to be on the table, to a lukewarm reception as you might imagine.

7:36 he does seem to be gripping the hall, though.

7:35 his grandfather arived in pittsburgh with nothing. imagine that!

7:30 alright. crush it rand. on obamacare: "the whole damn thing is unconstitutional." he didn't wind up at all: just started right in. hasn't he read speechwriting for complete idiots (i.e. politicians)? "the president believes roads create success, instead of the other way round." he actually put the quote into context, stomped on it anyway. this is an extremely combative approach.

7:24 now they've got lead singer of night ranger in front of g.e. smith. not awfully good. where's ted nugent? coming up with right rockers must be tough. maybe they need 13 knots. the republican convention should look more like this:

7:10 ron paul tribute video! and here comes mitch mcconnell to introduce rand. wow mitch ain't exactly electrifying. oops maybe he wasn't introducing rand after all. they definitely tried to make sure no one saw he paul vid.

well i'll do that convention thing again tonight.