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.