I’ll give the Human Turdbag this much, that speech was a goddamned spectacle to behold. It’d have been a real barnburner if it wasn’t apparent that the whole barn has already been on fire for three days before he got up there, and if I hadn't watched it live I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the ashes of Cruz's burned bridges from those of the GOP...but I'll be damned if it didn't make for the best episode of Death of a Political Party yet.
It started out with the usual trappings of a Cruz speech, how the slaying of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge are somehow proof that the country needs more Conservative values (read: even more unchecked assault weapons flooding into the streets, enough divisive rhetoric to justify anything, and an even blinder eye to oppression in America).
There was a twist to this though, and at first it seemed strange to me until I remembered who I was listening to and what kind of a person he is and why I call him a living sack of shit. He warned against the kind of reckless hate that leads to incidents like the Orlando shooting and it took me a second to remember that Orlando was the one at the gay nightclub, whose victims he has tirelessly fought to deny rights to, and who hid in the bathrooms he had made a particular focus of his absurd primary campaign.
“The Bill of Rights lets us live according to our conscience” he had the audacity to say, having previously described same sex marriage as a threat to Liberty, and transgender citizens as child raping perverts. “Cast aside hate for love” was a particularly great line for a man who called for the creation of ghettos for American Muslims just a few months earlier.
But then the whole thing became something else, a real Cruz missile aimed squarely at the Trump campaign. Not so much in what he said, but what he didn't. Anyone with a working brain who was even remotely familiar with the primary campaign could not have expected a particularly strong Trump endorsement during that speech, as anything over the top would have been obviously disingenuous after the months of sniping between the two of them. But his complete aversion to using the Trump name and telling Republicans to vote their conscience was magnificent, and the boos that rose from the crowd were shocking and glorious.
It was like a viking suicide. There he was, stabbing himself in the gut and slowly pulling out whatever he could find inside for all to see, with that smug shit-eating grin on his face. Newt Gingrich had to be immediately pushed on stage to retcon Cruz's statement, suggesting he'd actually endorsed Trump even if no one had actually heard one and Cruz had never actually given one. Newt is an experienced and eager liar when the situation calls for it, so I guess we should just be lucky nobody had to be diagnosed with cancer before he started fucking us around.
The convention was incredulous at the whole affair. "If you get invited to a dinner party you don't show up just to piss on the rug" the Republican commentariat suggested afterwards. Fair enough I suppose, but if you call a man's wife ugly, convince your tabloid publishing friend to accuse him of philandering, and then imply that his father killed John F. Kennedy, how goddamned stupid do you have to be to invite him to dinner in the first place?
Still, the Cruz ordeal was better to my mind - or at least, tickled me far better - than Little Marco, who gave a reasonably decent endorsement of Donald Trump via pre-recorded video so he could say he didn't attend the convention but still weasel his way into the Trump camp. For a few minutes I thought he was trying to call for a coalition government with the Bloc Quebecois and needed a fresh splash of gin to get past it.
Jesus, at least Kasich had the good sense to just keep his head down and stay out of Cleveland altogether this week, with his balls intact.
I swear, inviting Cruz to speak and then not being prepared for the aftermath is just the latest in a long long list of catastrophic blunders this convention has committed, ruining their best prime-time exposure for the third night in a row. If we can't trust them to adequately organize their own circle jerk we're all going to be screwed if they manage to win some real power.
It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise, but still I'm struck by it. With no real policy ideas to run and a candidate who seems to be deathly allergic to positivity, the whole convention has been a Clinton-bashing event from start to finish. The daily themes, "Make America Work Again", "Make America First Again" have really all been variations of the first night, "
Everything is so completely bizarre. I can't recall another party convention where so many speakers have been on stage and yet gone to such lengths to completely avoiding using the nominee's name. Nobody seems to want to actually endorse Trump, the whole show is about how awful the Obama administration has been, how Hillary Clinton is a traitor, and how Conservatives are worth voting for even if they lead to a Donald Trump Presidency and an early end to Western Civilization. "Please!" Paul Ryan is screaming with his teary eyes any time he's on stage, "Please keep my congressional majority!".
I had actually been looking forward to Make America Work Again on Tuesday night and - anticipating a slew of anti-Mexican, anti-Chinese economic fear mongering - had spent the evening eating Tex-Mex and drinking cheap asian beer. Alas, Make America Work Again turned out to just be more of the same. The hits were constant and baffling: from Chris Christie's mob witch trial (it turns out if you fill an arena full of jabbering neurotics you can make call-and-answer work really well), to Ben Carson claiming that Clinton consorts with Satan worshipers.
Literally, Hillary Clinton is in league with Lucifer and his minions. This was delivered as a major presentation at a political convention in the United States of America, to rancorous applause, and yet they will wonder why nobody takes them seriously anymore.
I've disliked the Clintons in general for some time and I could still be convinced that Hillary Clinton's candidacy is secretly a PR stunt by Robin wright to promote Clair Underwood and House of Cards. Yet after three days of this mess not only is it clear that she's staggeringly more qualified to be President but I'm actually starting to look forward to the prospect.
Oh well, if I don't wrap this up I'll just end up foaming at the mouth until I choke to death: The Republicans have an official nominee, after a tedious but relatively drama-free state-by-state roll call. Thousands of delegates cast their votes loudly and enthusiastically. They talked up the things they love about their state and their pride in how firmly the GOP control their legislatures and state offices, even if data will bear out that these rank among the most garbage places on the continent.
At any rate, the serious business of the convention finished on Tuesday afternoon and freed us to relax and enjoy the decline into dementia. It was the closest thing to "an exercise in democracy" we're likely to see in the convention, and it felt exactly like having all of the blood drained slowly from your body.
I've been husked before, but never as part of a group. We now live in a reality where a racist misogynist like Donald Trump can bloviate and hate his way into being the Presidential nominee for an American political party. We will never again know a universe where that isn’t true. Such an existence hardly seems worth sustaining: after President Trump triggers World War Three and the nuclear warheads come, I don’t think I have the heart left in me to try and escape into the forest anymore; I’d rather just be vaporized.
