Their unconscionable silence on Gaza still festers. But the lofty, boisterous, eloquent DNC was still both gratifying and revealing of the chasm between Democrats and the mean-spirited, blundering MAGA world of "that hateful man," a dystopian pit where family love is "weird," Coach Walz is a Chinese spy - Tiananmen Tim! - J.D. Vance is a cringey horror and a blithering felon calls "Comrade Kamala" a moron. "What kind of America do we want?" asks a Harris ad. Not their dark, daft, cruel, reptilian one, thanks.
The joyful good will of this week's convention was perhaps most evident in their jubilant roll call, which stood in sharp contrast to the GOP's funereal, fear-mongering, consistently cruel event. Along with the multitude of grinning women of color, some of its highlights: Spike Lee front and center in New York's do-the-right-thing delegation, raucous Georgia delegates voting "in the spirit of (the much-missed John Lewis') good trouble," and Tennessee's beaming, rousing pastor, state rep and social justice advocate Justin Pearson declaring, "The movement for justice rooted in love is strong in Tennessee," where women, kids, those pushed down "will be lifted up," and "we believe justice will roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-running stream."
There was also powerful rhetoric from two Obamas. Almost exactly 20 years after a soaring keynote in which he praised his parents' “faith in the possibilities of this nation - in no other country on earth is my story even possible," Barack echoed America's "central story, that we are all created equal...connected as one people." In a newly eyes-wide-open change, he also decried "a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining...who sees power as a means to his end (to) put 'other' people in their place - an act that has gotten pretty stale." He made a dick joke, then got serious: "We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a better story."
A fiery Michelle likewise both cited the belief that "you do unto others, you love thy neighbor," and blasted an entitled grifter who "demeans and cheapens our politics (by) demonizing others," which "only makes us small." “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American. No one,” she said. "Most of us will never be afforded (the) grace of failing forward...If we bankrupt a business (or) choke in a crisis, we don't have the luxury of whining or cheating others...We don't get to change the rules so we always win. We put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something." In a great, wry, final taunt, she mused of the man who spent years maligning her, "Who’s going to tell him the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”
Other Dems piled on to decry what Charlie Pierce calls "a vulgar talking yam," the voice of "an unappeasable vengeance in the land." SNL's Kenan Thompson hauled in the massive Project 205 to warn against "a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time." Oprah Winfrey described a neighborly, non-MAGA country where, "When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the owner’s race or religion (or) wonder who their partner is. We just try to do the best we can to save them, and if the place (belongs) to a childless cat lady, we try to get the cat out too.” Hakeem Jeffries likened Trump to an old boyfriend you broke up with who won't go away: "Bro, we broke up with you for a reason." Pete Buttigieg called for an uplifting politics, but "darkness is what they are selling."
We need no further proof than the latest, lowest insanity being sent out into the world by an ever-uglier, wackier Trump: A video parody of Alanis Morisette's song Ironic, from Nazi pro-trump "Dilly Meme Team," starring Kamala Harris and titled Moronic. LOL. Get it?!? It features a swirling montage of...something. There are images of black guys in jail, Hunter Biden, Hunter and Joe, with Obama in charge. They are all awash in scary red fists, a hammer and sickle, a statue of Stalin, and marching/dancing Kamala is just like him, but more of a ho. They are accompanied by lyrics: "It's like jail/full of black inmates/no free ride/she will incarcerate/and she never thought/just giggles....Isn't it moronic? Don't you think/ a little too moronic?" Yes.
— (@)
And so it goes. Trump is still weird, ugly, dangerous, idiotically wildly ill-informed: He persists in arguing tariffs, charges on imported goods, are paid by countries producing them: “It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs." Glumly speaking to a handful of silent, stony cops in Michigan, purportedly about crime, he claimed, "You can't walk across the street to get a loaf of bread, you get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, whatever it may be. You've seen it, I've seen it." In his fever dreams. Democrats "just have it out for the police, nobody knows why," he said of prosecutor and A.G. Harris' "pro-crime, anti-police record." He added, "She repeatedly wants to defund police, and you know it never goes away when you're a defunder...That's where her spirit is."
In a middle-of-the-night post, he blasted "highly overrated Jewish governor" Josh Shapiro, who refuses to acknowledge "I am the best friend that Israel and the Jewish people ever had" (and) it's not even close." (He is also 12 years old.) He claimed five people were killed at DNC protests. He says "we're very close to a third world war." He babbles "every American was safer under President Trump (when) I sat behind that beautiful Resolute desk." But Biden is copying him: "Guys are copying me. They thought the words were beautiful. Republicans were copying me because they happened to be right. Any of you guys want to copy me." Also, he's hosting a J6 Awards Gala next month at one of his crappy golf courses to honor the "peaceful J6 hostages."
Meanwhile, House goon James Comer, having finished trying to impeach Biden and issuing a long report that found no crimes, has moved on to smear America's Dad, corn-dog booster and Minnesota Nice teacher and coach Tim Walz as a Manchurian-Candidate-type Chinese agent who is maybe being "groomed" - More grooming! We're gonna be so neat! - to give China "a foothold in our government" because at 25 Walz taught in China for a year and later led students on multiple trips there. Comer told the FBI the House is investigating Walz' "extensive engagement" with China which "raises questions" about his decision-making, especially given he might have "ideology": "This is a guy that really has embraced China’s view of the world" - like it's the government's job to help people out of poverty - and "this is serious business!"
Comer gets pretty much everything wrong - "If you look at his background, especially when he ran for attorney general," he says of Walz, who never did 'cause he's not a lawyer - but the witless, paranoid "usual suspects" chimed in anyway. Tom Cotton: Walz "owes the American people an explanation." Marco Rubio: This is how Beijing "grooms future American leaders (to) allow China to steal our jobs & flood America with drugs.” Ron Johnson thinks it's "very strange" the Walz' married on June 4 - which nobody ever does - the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. In fact, Walz has been a vocal critic of Chinese human rights abuses. But when he met with the Dalai Lama, he says they mostly "talked about humility, patience and compassion. I try to embody these values every day in my work."
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J.D. Vance, of course, not so much. After the stirring speeches of Obamas et al, there was the wooden fake hillbilly in North Carolina trying to make a speech to a handful of zealots without putting his foot in what turns out to be a consistently Nazi mouth. Utilizing all his political savvy, he called North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un fat - ""Let's just say he doesn't miss a whole lotta meals," smirked the chubby white boy - to tell what he inexplicably seemed to think was an endearing story about Orange Cheato making a snide remark to Jong Un. "Trump stands there, and insults him," he smiles to unexpected silence. "So it means something to have a president who's not afraid to go into hostile territory, tell some jokes and actually engage in diplomacy." Umm.
Rushing through more baffled silence, he yammered about criticism of Trump's tweets with an incomprehensible segue: "Mean tweets and world peace has a pretty nice ring to it." Then he launched into babbling sycophancy - "This is a lifetime opportunity to re-elect a man who's proven he's too big for the deep state bureaucracy, he's too tough for the tyrants all over the world, he was too strong even for an assassin's bullet" - and conspiracy: "They (sic) couldn't beat him at the ballot box, so they tried to bankrupt him," when "they" failed they tried to impeach him (failed), tried to put him in prison (ditto) "and they even tried to kill him." Per Julia Louis-Dreyfus at the DNC, "they" were probably highly intelligent, capable women, aka "a coven of semi-menstruating witches."
In Wisconsin, Vance made sure to smear both Tim Walz and Chicago, which he called "the murder capital of America thanks to very failed Democrat leadership," though it's not and has a lower murder rate than both Cleveland and Cincinnati in Vance's own state. His "little theory" about the DNC being held in Chicago: "Tim Walz has been going around saying that he served in war, so (now) he could actually accurately say that he visited a combat zone." Among many others, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has his icky number: "A nice thing about not being mayor anymore is I don't care who hears me tell this clown to STFU." She joins the TikToker who held a J.D. Vance mock make-up tutorial "because who says gender-affirming care is only for the left?"
After a painful, pointlessly hostile "joke" aimed at reporters - To deli owner: "You have any food you really don’t like? We’ll take some and feed it to the journalists on the plane" - he did it again Thursday at a Georgia presser. "If it's a fake news anchor, I'd appreciate y'all just letting them ask their question," he "joked" to a small crowd. "It's okay, we can run them out of town after." The event ended with a blaring, baffling Guns 'N Roses Live and Let Die: "When you got a job to do you got to do it well." Then the hillbilly man of the people went to a donut shop and made an excruciating effort to have a normal chat with workers that consisted of asking each one, "How long have you worked here?" and each time dully responding, "OK." Live and let die indeed.
— (@)
Back at the DNC, the weirdness and darkness lifted with the acceptance speech of plain-speaking, savvy coach and "son of the Nebraska plains" Tim Walz. In his pep talk - "It’s the fourth quarter, we’re on offense, and we’ve got the ball" - he said "neighbor" 7 times, "school" 8 times, "freedom" 9 times. He touted free school lunches: "While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing kids’ hunger from ours." He opened up about his and his wife Gwen's gratitude for access to IVF treatments after years of struggling to start a family "because this is a big part of what this election is about - freedom." A longtime hunter, he boasted he's "a better shot than most Republicans in Congress, and I've got the trophies to prove it."
His grinning, beefy former state championship football team came out to cheer for him; one member praised Coach Walz as the kind of guy who'd pull you out of a snowbank, which he knew because Walz once pulled him out of a snowbank. When he finished speaking, Walz walked off stage to one of his favorite songs, Neil Young's Rockin‘ in the Free World. (Young personally allowed the campaign to use the song; when the Trump campaign had earlier used it, Young sued them.) Before he left the stage, in the evening's most memorable coda, he looked straight at his family in the audience and declared, with shining eyes, "Hope, Gus and Gwen, you are my entire world, and I love you." His tearful son Gus, overcome with love, stood up and shouted, "That's my dad!"
To the normal world, it was a deeply moving moment, a familial coming together of a father and son who clearly, deeply love each other. But to the malevolent denizens of the party of alleged Christian, family values, it was "pathetic," "embarrassing," "weird" to see Walz' "stupid crying son" and “blubbering bitch boy" honor his father. "You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male," sneered MAGA goon Mike Crispi. "Does Barron Trump cry? Nope...That's the types (sic) of values I want leading this country." From radio host Jay Weber: "If the Walzs represent today's American man, this country is screwed." And from (single, childless) Ann Coulter, who once griped about having to watch 9/11 widows "marinate in their exquisite personal agony," "Talk about weird..."
Talk about monstrous. Some backed down, slightly, once they learned the Walz' had openly talked about Gus being neurodivergent, with a non-verbal learning disorder, anxiety and ADHD, conditions they call his "secret power," which "millions of Americans also have." But it was too late for the monsters to even remotely redeem themselves. "I can see why a child loving their parents would feel foreign to you," Rick Wilson told Coulter, musing she "will die alone, and forensic pathologists will discover her withered corpse is nothing but Marlboro reds and box wine." Added a Jesuit priest, "90% of the Christian life is: Don’t be mean." Even God joined in: "Thou shalt not say a single goddamn unkind word about Gus Waltz." And so did, memorably, profanely, TikToker "Rubyshoo."
— (@)
Many of the DNC speeches, it was gladly noted, sought to reclaim "the roots of American democracy," with its symbols and its hopeful theme of rising from humble beginnings, working through darkness and coming into light. At one after-party, Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean played a ripping Star Spangled Banner like Hendrix at Woodstock before proclaiming, "I’m the best of the American dream." Part of that recovery meant taking on a tattered "patriotic" mantle the right-wing has long and wrongly claimed for itself. "Fighting the climate crisis is patriotic," declared Maxwell Frost, Generation Z’s first Congressman. "And unlike Donald Trump, our patriotism is more than some damn slogan on a hat. It's about giving a damn about the people who live in this country."
Often, the rage at Trump and the devastation he wrought was palpable. Al Sharpton on a grifter intent only on "making himself richer and sowing division to get that done": "In November, we’re gonna show him when Blacks do their jobs." "Harris understands what our military is for - to defend us from foreign enemies," said former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. "It is not to threaten Americans, and it sure as hell isn't to put immigrants in camps." Soon, said an impassioned Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated Central Park Five and now a New York Council member, "We will finally say goodbye to that hateful man." He went on, "We will say what I said after 7 long years of wrongful incarceration: Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last."
"The character of the people we put into leadership will determine what that government does," said Harris in her acceptance speech. Trump "is an unserious man," she noted, but the consequences of giving him power are deadly serious: "Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails." She went on to highlight "what's happening in our country because of Donald Trump," and what could lie ahead. He and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, enact a nationwide abortion ban with or without Congressional approval. "And get this, get this," she said. "He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put - they are out of their minds."
With his odds shrinking, that's truer than ever. After Harris' speech, he called Fox to jabber about her fictional misdeeds, so rattled he kept hitting his beeping phone buttons. Asked about his strategy to win back voters drawn to her, he sputtered, "She’s not having success. I’m having success." Pundits say Harris and Walz will likely continue to rise in the polls. They are looking and sounding good, not least in a fabulous, Jeffrey-Wright-narrated, prosecutor-vs-felon-themed ad featuring Beyoncé's thunderous Freedom; she gave them permission but sent Trump a cease-and-desist letter. "Are you ready to make your voice heard?" asks Harris in the soaring ad. "When we fight, we win." If she can summon the critical strength to stop killing and maiming children in Gaza, we will.
