The blogs reflect on Wednesday at the convention

I've been blog-surfing on the Wednesday evening convention of the Society for Permanent War.

A night like Wednesday was made for the analytical wit of Bob Somerby, aka the Daily Howler.  On Zell Miller's riff about how American troops are alway "liberators" and never "occupiers":

Wow! But who has called American troops “occupiers?” Absent-mindedly, Miller forgot to say. And of course, President Bush has routinely described the situation in Iraq as an “occupation.” But so what? Delegates wouldn’t confront such trivia on this glorious, smut-slinging night. And they wouldn’t have to know how fake Miller’s sliming of Kerry really was ...

Those us whose foreign-policy ideas are not limited to "Reason?  We don't need no reason to go to war!", it's worth noting that the United States formally asked the United Nations to designate the US as the occupying power in Iraq in 2003.  It's a category in international law that includes specific obligations, a number of which Bush's occupation government violated.  The current "transition" regime is now recognized by the UN as a "sovereign" government, which mean the occupation is technically over.  In practice, Iraq's armed forces are practically non-existent and their police forces nearly so.  In reality, the US is still an occupying power in Iraq and has every prospect of remaining so for a long time to come.

The Howler notes, "Laughably, [Zell] scolded Kerry for 'trying to shut down' the Apache helicopter—which Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, tried to shut down in 1989!"

The previous day, the Howler asked, "Is there a bigger fake in American life than the man [Zell] who speaks at the Garden tonight?"  I would still have to give the prize to Bush and his May 1 "Mission Accomplished" Sheriff Top Gun appearance on the USS Abraham Lincoln last year.  But Zell is a close second.

The bizarre and generally war-drunk Andrew Sullivan really wanted to be able to cheer for Bush the Magnificent.  But Zell was a bit too much even for him:  ("The Miller Factor," 09/02/04):

Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. ... Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes. His speech tonight was in this vein, a classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric. As an immigrant to this country and as someone who has been to many Southern states and enjoyed astonishing hospitality and warmth and sophistication, I long dismissed some of the Northern stereotypes about the South. But Miller did his best to revive them. The man's speech was not merely crude; it added whole universes to the word crude.

Amazing.  Even Andrew Sullivan couldn't swallow Zell's nonsense about "liberators/occupiers" (same link, "The 'Occupation' Canard" 09/02/04):

But the term "occupation," of course, need not mean the opposite of liberation. I have used the term myself and I deeply believe that coalition troops have indeed liberated Afghanistan and Iraq. By claiming that the Democrats were the enemies of the troops, traitors, quislings and wimps, Miller did exactly what he had the audacity to claim the Democrats were doing: making national security a partisan matter. I'm not easy to offend, but this speech was gob-smackingly vile.

Sullivan managed to find Dick Cheney's Darth Vader act "sound."  He notes, though, "it is astonishing to me that neither he not anyone, in invoking the war on terror, has mentioned any developments in Iraq or Afghanistan over the last year. ... Real war-leaders explain defeats and set-backs, they recognize the current situation, they grapple with reality." But after Sullivan's record on the Iraq War and the so-called "war on terrorism," it's hard to resist the temptation to say, "Well, duh!  You're just now figuring that out, Andrew?"

Steve Gilliard has been following the protests during the last week, and what he's had to say about them reflect good judgment, it seems to me, though the near presence of so many die-hard Republicans has brought more than the use supply on cuss words into Steve's posts.  He's feeling optimistic from a Democratic perspective, though:

I haven't fully wound my mind around this yet, but the GOP seems to have blundered seriously from day one. While the right is happy, I think that's a sign that things are going badly. The twins were pissing off the right, and everyone else was either saddened or embarassed. The idea that the President's people thought that their daughters would be cute was amazing, but then the Bushes have always had a very high opinion of their popularity.

Their judgements have been bad. From Rudy's speech, which was both cheezy and lies, to Zell Miller's Horst Wessel was my hero speech, seems to misread the mood of the country. This is not a serious convention. They're using 9/11 in the cheapest, most glub way possible. No talk of how people pulled together and showed an amazing national character. Just the cheap use of fear and demagougery. The convention is hitting the wrong notes because Bush and Rove have no connection to real America. If it had, Miller's speech would have been seriously toned down. ...

[F]rom the GOP, there was nothing but invective and a call for blind, unthinking loyalty, something we don't ask of soliders in a free society, much less ordinary citizens. ...

But as an American, Miller's words, forget his wigging out afterwards, embarassed me. It seems he forgot why soldiers died. It wasn't to be worshiped or to stiffle dissent. It was to defend our values, not replace them. Not to emulate fascist thugs.

Steve illustrated this post on Cheney's speech with a photo of Darth Vader.  He says, "Cheney lied like a [expletive deleted] last night. He lied and he lied badly."

Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED compares Zell Miller to notorious "paleoconservative" and anti-Semite Pat Buchanan:  "Buchanan was John Edwards compared to this."

Atrios think Zell Miller is more of a Democrat than it appears:  "The Democratic Party is smarter than I thought. Who knew that they'd spent the last two years inserting Zell Miller as a deep mole into the Republican Party so that he could bring the whole operation down from the inside."  On the whole, he was quite pleased with Wednesday's events: "We couldn't have hoped for a bigger convention [expletive deleted] from the Republicans than we had tonight. A thing of beauty."

Hesiod on Zell Miller's John Calhounesque speech:  "if that hate-filled, fascistic rant went over 'better' with average swing voters than with people like me, I'm packing up my family and moving to Canada before I wind up in Guantanamo Bay, or shot."  But he also considers the possibility that Zell is on a deep-undercover mission for the Kerry campaign:  "His neo-McCarthyite looney-toons rant last night was so over-the-top stupid and scary that it could only have been a deliberate operation by the Democrats to sabotage President Bush's reelection chances."

This post from Kos is a good example of the way many Democrats are rubbing their eyes this week and saying, is the Republican Party really this much of a train wreck?  Are we dreaming?

I thought Monday went well enough for the Republicans. McCain phoned it in, but Giuliani is a gifted orator. No one saw the event, however, since it wasn't televised by the networks.

Tuesday offered up the disastrous Bush Twins, and the medicated (and some say, botoxed) Laura Bush. But Schwarzanegger did his job well.

But today? Jesus. What a frickin' disaster for the other side. Zell was downright frightening. And Dick doesn't have an iota of charisma. He didn't eat any babies, but he was still "scare, scare, scare". ...

 Between Girly Men, floosie Bush twins, and Zell's frothing rant, they're not firing on all cylinders. They are beatable, and we are going to beat them.

Duckman GR at the Left Coaster observes of (presumably) Zell and Cheney: "These guys are scary, not in a Luca Brazi way, but in a Charles Manson way."

Steve Soto of the same blog says, "Zell didn’t disappoint the GOP in his ability to lie like the rest of them.It’s just that some of his lies tonight were flat-out reprehensible, like the smear on national TV about the Kevlar vests, which Miller knows isn’t true."

But since Democrats are notorious worrywarts, let me suggest that Wednesday's war rally was really a clever, devious Karl Rove plot to make sure that Bush himself comes off as warm, cuddly and sympathetic by contrast.

A large block of ice would come off warm and cuddly next to Zell Miller and Darth Cheney.