RNC Hell Week Crescendo Tonight!



I listened to a portion of Rudy Giuliani's speech last night. Like a commenter at another Web Site said, and quoting Molly Ivins, I would have preferred the speech in its original German.

Some things Rudy said were quite funny. Talking about Wasilla, AK (and paraphrasing what he said): "they probably cling to religion there." Funny! Sarcastic, but funny! I thought up one of my own: "They don't grow arugula in Wasilla," but Rudy had gone overtime, and I just bet he would have offended the well-organized lobby of arugula farmers from some crucial swing state somewhere. And, who knows, maybe they do grow arugula in Wasilla. That southern Alaskan soil does support some of the largest and strangest vegetables in the U.S., providing mutant pumpkins and watermelons among other things.

The amazing hypocrisy Olympics of the Republican convention is what startled most of all. The Republican Party abandoned many its well-considered Culture War positions of the last century in one short, spectacular week! Amazing! What will they do next? It's just a matter of time before its anti-abortion stance goes too, at this rate.

NKB sends this:

When I first heard about Sarah Palin's, uh, domestic irregularities, I expected social conservatives to react with a kind of qualified, patronizing support—we are all sinners, there but for the grace of God, something like that. Instead, they are embracing her with unbridled admiration. The Family Research Council praised her for "choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation." Cathie Adams of the Eagle Forum, a conservative women's group, called her "the kind of woman I've been looking for all along." The two difficult pregnancies—Palin's with a Down syndrome baby and now her unmarried teenage daughter's—is just proof that "they're doing everything right," gushes Adams. Even the stern religious right godfather James Dobson doted: "A lot of people were praying, and I believe Sarah Palin is God's answer."

...What's missing from the conservative reaction is still remarkable. Just 15 years ago, a different Republican vice president was ripping into the creators of Murphy Brown for flaunting a working woman who chose to become a single mother. This time around, there's no stigma, no shame, no sin attached to what Dan Quayle would once have mockingly called Bristol Palin's "lifestyle" choices. In fact, so cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison. "I think a hard-working, well-organized C.E.O. type can handle it very well," said Phyllis Schlafly, of the Eagle Forum.

Suddenly it's the Obamas, with their oh-so-perfect marriage and their Dick Van Dyke in the evenings and their two boringly innocent young girls, who seem like the fuddy-duddies.

...The most remarkable differences between the large mass of evangelicals and the rest of Americans are in divorce statistics. Since the '70s, evangelicals and the coastal elites have effectively switched places. Evangelicals are now far more likely to get divorced, whereas couples with four years of college education have cut their divorce rates in half. An intact happy marriage that produces well-behaved children, it turns out, is becoming a luxury of the elites—bad news for the Obamas.