I was going to write a long post about the RNC, but I can’t bring myself to waste brain energy on it.
Open thread.
49 thoughts on “RNC Open Thread”
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Apt. 11d 
It didn’t seem to go very well.
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I’m going to join Laura in deploying my mental energy to higher ends. In fact, I have deployed my viewing energy to the Yankees rather than the convention, so I couldn’t say much even if I tried.
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It feels very amateur. I don’t have the stomach to beat up Melania. She’s a child.
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I wouldn’t say “child”: she’s about as well informed as the average actress or model, and they count as adults. Just not the kind of adults I would want to spend time with. I always cringe when I hear people like that talk politics, although it must be worse for Laura, since most of them are liberals.
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“Child” was the wrong word. She’s not a professional politician. She doesn’t seem particularly smart. This isn’t her deal. Whatever. I hold her to a different standard than a political candidate.
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It wasn’t an interview. You’d think they would have given her something scripted that was better. I think maybe they even hate legal immigrants.
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They seemed to have mentioned Satan and prison more often than other conventions I remember.
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Are the mainstream Republicans biting their tongues? Did they give up? Would they rather have T***p than a Democrat in the White House? Do they have access to accurate polling numbers and are letting this play out knowing that he won’t win the White House? Is it a scorched earth strategy and they’ll rebuild later?
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Senator Sasse has gone to the banks of the Platte River to think. I don’t know that he’s come up with anything practical. He should probably use a deeper river.
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I agree that we shouldn’t think of Melania as a child — but, I do think that she doesn’t understand plagiarism (and, if the ex-ballet dancer who shouldered the blame is really responsible, neither does the friend). When I read the plagiarized words, it struck me that they are the mistake I’ve seen in non-native speakers using examples to write their own work
When I was expounding on this theory, my mother, a non-native english speaker, pointed out that’s how people learn a new language: they are given text “I went to the store on tuesday” and then asked to replace the relevant words to make a true statement about themselves (“I went to the office on monday”. I could see the bones of all that in the plagiarized text, including the substitution of “strength” for “reach” of dreams, which struck me as a translation one fixes, when you translate text into a language you’re more familiar with, and it doesn’t make sense, so then you try for another word.
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bj said:
“When I was expounding on this theory, my mother, a non-native english speaker, pointed out that’s how people learn a new language: they are given text “I went to the store on tuesday” and then asked to replace the relevant words to make a true statement about themselves (“I went to the office on monday”.”
That’s exactly how the Soviet textbooks taught English when I was working in a Russian school in the 1990s. I expect that was how Mrs. Trump learned English, too.
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“Would they rather have T***p than a Democrat in the White House? ”
Yes, I think that’s what they’ve decided. And I think that decision shows a dismissal of the many ways that even Trump’s candidacy is affecting the country:
https://newrepublic.com/article/135148/trump-made-america-racist-republicans-ok-that – as one example
But, also on lying (and then lying done more to the point where truth itself has been completely devalued), morality, language, decency, . . .
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I don’t think a magazine that counts Marty Peretz among its former owners has a lot of moral standing to denounce ethnic insensitivity. If you took the things the New Republic has printed about Arabs, and compared to anything the Republicans have said, you wouldn’t pick the Republicans as the racists.
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Somebody better start a new magazine before we forget that the calling all Mexican immigrants rapists is pretty racist.
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I guess I’ve used other computers to comment here for the past couple of weeks.
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Which news sources are less racist?
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Laura Ingraham? Her right elbow is like Shakira’s hips in that it can’t lie.
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And, have no former racist owners? Do I need to give up citing the constitution, too?
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As you may know we recently had a federal election in Canada which the Liberals won handily over the Conservatives. The previous Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper had taken the right wing party so far right and was so nasty and racist and anti-immigrant in his policies that even previous Tory Prime Ministers and senior party officials were horrified.
Harper ran the party into the ground. I’m no Tory but there’s a history and a legacy of career politicians and public servants who have worked under that banner with integrity. Just as there are in the Republican party.
This business now with T***p? I hope the party can survive him.
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“Ethnic insensitivity”?
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Is that the politically correct term for racism?
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I’m trying to be polite. You can call Marty Peretz and the New Republic racist, if you like; it won’t bother me.
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Peretz has certainly made racist comments (though he has apologized for at least some of them). But, I don’t think his former involvement taints the document forever (see, constitution). And, yes, I’m calling Thomas Jefferson racist, too.
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Thomas Jefferson can’t be racist. He’s black!!!
#whatdimiss?
(Technically still in Germany but heading home)
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You missed me! In Berlin!
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I thought you were in one of those places Putin was taking over sooner rather than later.
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Doug, we were nowhere near Berlin, unfortunately. I really want to go back. Our next Germany trip will probably involve the eastern half again (Berlin, Nuremberg and in-between), with a touch of Prague and Vienna.
MH, we started in Germany, then drove to Netherlands, then Belgium, then dipped into France briefly for genealogical reasons, then back to Germany. Trip winners: Van Gogh Museum, Bruges, Belgian chocolate. Trip losers: Frankfurt Airport, unexpected European heat wave, lack of iced tea.
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That sounds like a nice trip. But I meant that I thought Doug lived in some place that is more denotatively Caucasian than the current convention.
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I shouldn’t post at 4 am Europe time. Or 5 am US time. My body is soooo confused right now.
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Was in Tbilisi when the Russian Army came to visit in ’08. Moved to Moscow some years later, when Putin was temporarily not president. Turns out that international civil-society work (what my better half does) was not really wanted in the Russian capital, and we left in ’12 a couple of months before the Russian government gave USAID two weeks’ notice to gtfo after about 20 years of cooperation. Putin was president again by then. I want to stress that I haven’t been to Ukraine since (I think) 2005, and as much as I would have liked to visit Kazantip, I had nothing to do with the whole Crimea business. Berlin is quiet, orderly, and well-run compared to all of that.
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I thought Berlin was supposed to be quiet, well-run, and orderly compared to most things.
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It’s interesting to read commenters at redstate.com. I still disagree with everything they believe, but antagonism to trump sometimes uncovers views we can agree on (like its wrong to mock a disabled person).
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I found a better picture.
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Of what? Laura Benanti’s of Melania is pretty impressive. I think it doesn’t overstep the bounds of piling on Melania. I like this by Benanti “What was the hardest part of nailing her style of speech?
Honestly, trying to honor the dialect in a way that didn’t feel like I was mocking a person when English is not their first language. That was really my biggest concern.”
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Of Laura Ingraham gesturing either well very or very poorly.
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Even though I know he didn’t write the constitution.
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If I have this correctly, of the three failed candidates for the Republican nomination who won at least one state, only one is at the convention* and he very pointedly refused to endorse Trump. If you add the three that won any delegates but not a state, only one is there. That’s got to be some kind of record.
* I guess Rubio was there by video.
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I was just skipping through Cruz’s speech on youtube in order to get a sense of the crowd response for myself.
He both gets a lot of applause toward the end, as well as a lot of booing when he told voters to vote their consciences…
But then the camera switches to Trump, and Trump is very pointedly clapping his hands at the end of Cruz’s speech.
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Trump may have been getting ready to undermine NATO some more and not been paying his full attention to Cruz.
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I told my big kids this morning about the booing when Cruz said to vote your conscience.
The kids were horrified.
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I confess, I didn’t see it (the Yanks won their fourth in a row), but Cruz reminded me of Thomas Cranmer, whom I admire. That is my ambition, to have one last chance to spit in their eye when they strap me down.
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Thomas Moore did it better.
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Classic Cruz, right? You can see why all the senators hate him. Definitely not a team player. I wonder if he could run for governor?
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After reading an annotated speech, I kind of get what he did, that has even non-supporters of Trump annoyed: Cruz setup rhetorical expectations that he then denied. The debater’s equivalent of “I will endorse Trump. NOT!” (I hated it when that conversation twitch was popular).
Red State has an essay suggesting that Trump has a “crisis creation team” and it kind of makes sense to me. The rest of us see chaos but Trump sees everyone watching and paying attention. Even if they think they are watching a train wreck, that’s probably better than not watching at all.
I hope no one underestimates Trump going into the general eelction.
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Trump is certainly an illustration that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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For some reason I couldn’t reply directly, but Wendy, if you enjoyed Bruges I would highly recommend seeing the dark comedy In Bruges, if you haven’t already.
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We saw it twice, including once the week before we left. 🙂 I think it’s an absolutely hilarious movie. Man, now I want to watch it again.
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Hey, sorry that I couldn’t comment or write today. I had the usual pre-vacation laundry/packing nonsense today. I did 10,000 steps mostly in the house today. Terribly boring way to burn calories. I watched the convention and tweeted for about three solid hours last night and would have loved to write more on the blog. Maybe I’ll blog on the cell phone on the way to Rhode Island.
I can’t believe that we have to deal with Trump for another few months. Hopefully, it won’t be four years.
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Then you’d miss all the scenery of Connecticut.
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