I’ll confess I couldn’t stomach watching this first night in any detail (and I wonder just how many engineers could), but Andrew Sullivan, among many others, live-blogged it here if you like your convention coverage with an informed side helping of incredulity and even mourning, and a sprinkling of snark. Here’s his summary:
11:09 p.m [EDT]. Just mulling over the events tonight, there’s one obvious stand-out. I didn’t hear any specific policy proposals to tackle clearly stated public problems. It is almost as if governing, for the Republican right, is fundamentally about an attitude, rather than about experience or practicality or reasoning. The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation.
Which strikes me, honestly, as the results of third- and fourth-raters at work. While Colbert ridicules them on the television, I think this is just a continuation in theme of the entire primary season, because hardly anyone in the Republican race really came off as a competent politician. Maybe Kasich. Trump simply beat everyone by claiming he’d do this and do that, louder and more effectively than the rest – without saying how. By avoiding the “how” question, he lets the primary voters avoid doing anything hard, such as analysis and discussion.
And this is how much of the convention proceeded this evening – I did see parts of speeches by several mourning mothers, who blamed either Obama or Hillary for the deaths of their loved ones, and parts of other speeches proclaiming how Trump give America backbone once again, unlike Obama, who only killed Osama bin Laden, who took the nation into the overthrow of Libya, and thus gains some of the credit for the killing of the man responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, etc. It’s thought-free, emotion-laden, and often devoid of facts.
The nation should really go into mourning for the loss of the party of Lincoln. A man of careful thought, it’s impossible to connect the two without incoherent laughter.
