Potemkin convention Day 2 (Tuesday)

I only saw a brief segment of the Republican's "we're really nice moderate folks, honest to gosh we are" convention.

I watched a few minutes of Laura Bush earnestly doing her best Stepford Wife imitation, reading flawlessly from the teleprompter and sounding-like-there-was-a-dash-between-every-word.

Dick Cheney was already looking pained that he had to sit around pretending to take all this asking for the voters' support nonsense seriously.

Our California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took a break from his record-breaking fundraising - his most notable achievement as governor so far - to speak to the convention.

I was born in Europe ...and I've traveled all over the world. I can tell you that there is no place, no country, more compassionate more generous more accepting and more welcoming than the United States of America.

I can say with some degree of confidence that this statement will be met with some degree of, uh, scorn in his native Austria.

I finally arrived here in 1968. I had empty pockets, but I was full of dreams. The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon and Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend who spoke German and English, translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which is what I had just left. But then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting government off your back, lowering taxes and strengthening the military. Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air.

I must admit, I feel a twinge of nostalgia for the Nixon days myself.  He wasn't as authoritarian as our current president, nor as reckless in his foreign policy.  His administration wasn't so obsessed with secrecy.  As John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, has said in reference to the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame, "Planting (or leaking) this story about Valerie Plame Wilson is one of the dirtiest tricks I've seen in lowball/hardball politics. ... I thought they played dirty at the Nixon White House, but this is worse..." (Worse Than Watergate [2004])

Maybe it's quibbling, since in American political language "socialism" just means "bad."  And of course which of those foreign governments over there in Europe could possibly be better than America under Nixon?  But Austria had "Grand Coalition" governments from 1945 to 1970, in which the Socialist Party was the junior partner with the conservative Peoples Party.  The exceptions were a brief period in 1945 when a socialist-led coalition government was installed by the Allies, and 1966-1970 when the Peoples Party had a majority government without the Socialists in the coalition.  Except for those few months in 1945, the first Socialist-headed government in Austria was that of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky in 1970, after Arnie left Austria.

But I guess that's quibbling.

He spent a few words on dressing up Bush's "war on terrorism" with a happy face:

He knows you don't reason with terrorists. You defeat them. He knows you can't reason with people blinded by hate. They hate the power of the individual. They hate the progress of women. They hate the religious freedom of others. They hate the liberating breeze of democracy. But ladies and gentlemen, their hate is no match for America's decency.

We're the America that sends out Peace Corps volunteers to teach village children. We're the America that sends out missionaries and doctors to raise up the poor and the sick. We're the America that gives more than any other country, to fight aids in Africa and the developing world. And we're the America that fights not for imperialism but for human rights and democracy.

Well, sort of a happy face.  But all this talk about how you can't reason with a vaguely-defined Enemy and that hate us because of our freedoms just contributes to the vague sense of fear and menace that doesn't differentiate between terrorist groups targeting Americans and countries like Iraq that the grand strategists of the Bush administration think it would be a good idea to conquer and occupy.

Most of the rest of his speech was kind of standard pablum, really, about what a great country America is and how immigrants should vote for the Republican Party because Republicans like immigrants.

Schwarzenegger's main promise to immigrants in California during the recall coup in 2003 was to get a bill approved to allow undocumented immigrants to get drivers licenses.  As a reminder, the good Republican growers of California are essentially completely dependent on illegal immigrant labor, as are canneries and many home services to a large extent.  The system is corrupt to the bone, of course, but that's the way good California Republicans handle things.  And as long as we have hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants here, it would be helpful to have a car licensing program that encourages them to get at least basic instructions on state traffic laws.

A bill is expected to hit Schwarzenegger's desk soon.  We'll have to wait and see what our immigrant-friendly, smiley-face Republican governor will do.