Great article on the Zell appearance from hell.

John Kerry is a spineless Massachusetts liberal. As president, he would raise taxes on farms, families, puppies, and rainbows. He wants to send our boys into combat barefoot, with sticks. Also he puts razors in Halloween candy. John Kerry wets the bed.

This is the general impression left by Wednesday’s program at the Republican Convention. Until now, the convention has kept up a mask of jolly inclusiveness. Even the first part of last night’s program, “A Land of Opportunity,” stuck mostly to the banal pageantry that made Tuesday such a bore: small business extolled, minorities carefully deployed, etc. But the mask would have to drop sooner or later, and last night down it came–revealing the face of the emperor from Return of the Jedi.

Zell Miller might not be the most disgraceful politician in America, but last night he delivered the most disgraceful piece of political rhetoric in years. Introduced as “the conscience of the Democratic Party,” the former segregationist unleashed half an hour of breathtaking, conscience-free smears. (Miller’s party-bashing is the political equivalent of a man-bites-dog story; by making him the keynote speaker, the convention turned itself into a kind of long-form tabloid.) He could have broken from his party over first principles, more in sorrow than in anger. Instead he stuck with lies, like saying Kerry has vowed to use force only with U.N. approval, and distortions, like treating the loony left as the mainstream Democratic position. This is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that led John McCain to call out Michael Moore three nights ago. (For further dismantling of Miller’s speech, click here.)

The delivery was as repellent as the material, if you can believe it. It was not like Rudy Giuliani’s attack, which skipped from measured to biting to funny. Miller poured forth his hysteria in a rant, his face contorted by rage. Such malevolence, from a United States Senator? A talk-radio host would behave better. The delegates, for their part, ate up every intemperate syllable; where did all the pitchforks come from?

When you make Dick Cheney seem timid, you’ve done something really special. The vice president made the customary attacks on Kerry’s qualifications last night, in his customary style. Like Kerry, he’s a lousy speaker; unlike Kerry, he doesn’t care. The very lack of anything resembling charisma somehow gives him additional gravitas. He could be almost lovable if not for the smug smile he permits himself when the audience mocks Kerry. Last night they made tilting motions with their arms and chanted, “Flip-flop, flip-flop.”

There’s more. Read the whole delightful thing.

And no, I am not saying the Republicans are Nazis — just Zell Miller. He really qualifies.

Photoshopped image of Zell is via this fine site — and there are several more!

Occasionally we come across a fisking that is so surgical, so ruthless and perfect we can only read it with a sense of wonder. That’s how I felt as I read Fred Kaplan as he deconstructed, line by line, the prevarications and obscene excesses of Zell Miller and Dick Cheney as they spoke last night in NYC.

This is one of those articles I have to urge everyone to read. I am tempted to give some samples, but if I do that you may not read the article. Just leave this site and go there, and see why it’s so important to fact-check everything coming out of the mouths of these liars. As Kaplan says, we expect embellishment and exaggeration at party conventions. But flagrant lies like this simply aren’t acceptable — they’re disgusting. Please see for yourself.

And I wonder whether he’ll really get that post-RNC bounce. It’s your standard laundry-list stump speech, uninformative, uninspired and uninteresting. He’s being a bit sweeter than those who spoke before him; he’s not slamming Kerry as hatefully and absurdly as his VP or Zell Miller. But he’s still repeating the standard BS about the $87 billion and Kerry’s voting against weapons systems, framing it as though he was against defending America, although Cheney voted against those same systems.

All in all, it’s amazingly uneventful. I really would have thought Rove and Hughes would do better. I wasn’t 100 percent happy with Kerry’s big night, but he did way better than this. The best I can say about the speech is, at least bush didn’t rant about steroid abuse and sending a man to Mars….

They have in no way succeeded in telling us why we should vote for bush — only why we should vote against Kerry. They’ve done this well, and their messages are as powerful as they are untrue. It could really hurt. But I was expecting to see more. Meanwhile, Kerry has maintained his edge in the polls, even after weeks of the most merciless political crucifixion ever witnessed in this country. So I’m going to remain very cautiously optimistic. Especially after watching bush tonight. For all his efforts to display gravitas, there’s no getting around the sorry fact that he’s just a shrub.

A fortunate son indeed! This article is sure to make some waves through the blogosphere today. You have to watch a commercial, but it’s worth the 30 seconds. Will try to comment later, but now it’s off to work I go.

Via Washington Monthly, where you can find some accompanying commentary.

Zell and Cheney. (Pics via Kos.)

Excellent comments on their scary performances here.

Simon’s roundup of Asian links has become a real class act. It’s a great tool for scanning the goings-on in the region and should be part of any Asiaphile’s daily surfing.

I’m the Peking Duck, and I approve this message.

Just finished watching the insanity of Zell Miller and Dick Cheney at the RNC. They were good, and they accomplished their mission. They provided the emotional charge that these conventions are all about. But what they said was so laced with lies and innuendo and half-truths, I felt numb, helpless.

The smart bloggers like Tapped and Josh Marshall and, yes, Andrew Sullivan, will no doubt point out their prevarications, which were often painfully obvious. They knew they were lying and everyone there knew they were lying, but it just didn’t matter — it sounded great on TV. And I have to hand it to them — that’s what it’s all about.

To hear Dick “F*** yourself” Cheney say, with a straight face, that Kerry said we need to be more sensitive to the terrorists — it was heartbreaking (although it worked). Everyone knew he never said any such thing, that he was referring to being more sensitive to our allies. But Cheney ruthlessly and shrewdly exploited this “Gotcha!” moment. I can see Karl Rove in a hole somehwere when he heard Kerry say those words, and I know Rove had multiple orgasms. “He said the word ‘sensitive!’ Now we can make him look effette, effeminate, and….FRENCH! People who talk about sensitivity are girlie-men, the kind of people who eat snails and cheese! Kerry’s goose is cooked.”

Oh, how sad the state of politics has become in America. And to hear Cheney blend the war in Afghanistan with the Iraq war — that was painful, too. He said we were fighting for our freedom, for our survival and our safety — true enough in Afghanistan, but so blatantly not true in the case of our war against an aging dictator in the decline of his power with no weapons of mass destruction and incapable of posing any threat to anyone, let alone to America. And of course the supreme irony was that it was this second war that wiped out our chances of winning the war that really mattered! And yet, they somehow believe by invading Iraq, at unimaginable cost in terms of dollars and lives, that bush “saved” America. What can one say? It’s simply absurd, but it was said well and I can see many who don’t have the time to research the facts being sucked in.

At the DNC, almost nothing negative was said against bush. It was the buffoon Al Sharpton who broke the rules and slammed him. Otherwise, the focus was on the good Kerry could do. Was this a tragic mistake? Should they have fought fire with fire? Too early to say, but I may eventually come to that conclusion. Nice guys really do finish last, as we saw in both the 1988 and the 2000 elections. And this promses to be the very ugliest of all elections, because the incumbent has virtually no choice — all he can do is 1.) say I never waiver and I stick to my word (although that’s demonstrably false) and, 2.) attack, attack, attack — keep going for the jugular in every conceivable way, be it through discredited surrogates, attacks by former Democrats and beaming movie stars — whatever it takes. Since he has nothing to show for all the blood spilled, he can only focus on the steady and ruthless assassination of his opponent. And it’s a time-proven tactic, and it just may work.

And all of us will the profoundly the worse off for it, because bush will be able to load the Supreme Court and continue to drain our treasury and dish out succulent tax rewards to the rich and the super-rich. I can’t stand to see it, so the bad news is, I’m going to keep writing about it whenever i can. So let’s hope the next 10 weeks or so pass quickly. Watching America held hostage by these thugs is simply devastating, and if they have four more years I can only wonder how we’ll ever rise up again to be the world’s true leader.