I knew I couldn't bear to watch the television coverage of the Republican convention, especially not after flipping through the channels and catching a brief glimpse of the smirking Brit Hume (anyone know how to get vomit stains out of a carpet?), but I have been reading the newspaper, and I've been disappointed. I want the Republicans to lose, and lose big, but at the same time I keep hoping for some ray of light to shine through and show me a sensible conservative party, one that doesn't look like a lunatic asylum and that doesn't make me despair of the kind of humanity that would actually vote for such extremists.

Instead, I read about smug paranoids. Giuliani and McCain went on and on about terror and 9/11 and leadership—it's a party built on fear and the willingness to stoke self-righteous fury, relying on anger to blind the party faithful to the failures of their so-called "leader". I saw nothing to give me hope. I keep looking for the Republican who isn't a sanctimonious hatemonger, and while I'm sure they're out there, they weren't up on the podium or on the floor at this convention (and those were the moderates put up front and center? Yikes.) 9/11 was an impetus to action, but it was not the action itself; so can we please stop dwelling on the trigger and do something constructive for the future?

I keep looking for the Republicans the fantasist Garrison Keillor (via the Leiter Report) describes:

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican.

I keep looking for those reasonable people. They don't run the Republican party, that's for sure, and I'm increasingly convinced that anyone who sticks by that party does not deserve the label "reasonable". Give me some dissent, people. Show me that there's something other than fanatical drones intent on driving the country over a cliff.

I agree with Nathan Newman's summary—the current crop of Republicans have no substance to offer. They have wrapped themselves in a flag and are standing on a pile of rubble, chanting paeans to The Glorious Leader. Sadly, it seems to work, at least on some people.

The negative attacks on Kerry are all part of the package. Us "Bush haters" don't have to attack Bush as a person, because we can name policy after policy we disagree with. But th Bush people know that Kerry's real position on the war-- it was necessary to put pressure on Hussein, but the rush to war without finishing the inspections process and strengthening our alliances was a disaster-- is the position most Americans agree with. So they have to lie about Kerry's position and make him out to have changed his mind.
They can't mention domestic issues, since they know on health care and taxes and jobs, Kerry's positions are more in tune with the country. They can't discuss the environment, since they know Kerry's positions are more popular. They can't mention civil rights given Bush's laxness in enforcement and promotion of antigay policies.
So that leaves lies and the politicization of the 911 dead. Sitting in Madison Square Garden amidst the whoops for that policy, it makes me long to go read Pat Buchanan's new book. Where he hates, it's at least honest hate and bigotry, not the manufactured cynicism I experienced last night.

I'll skip on Buchanan, but otherwise he's right…Republican hopes all seem to rest on one tragic day in the past, and this bunch have nothing to promise for the future.