For all of us that couldn’t bear to watch any moments on TV. And also knew that much of the best or more important stuff at natiional conventions doesn’t make it to TV anyway.
Matt Taibbi: Trump’s Appetite for Destruction Another masterpiece. That I’ll only risk spoiling a small bit for others. And only because it illustrates a point that some like me need occasional remainders of.
From other written reports and skimming the text of Trump’s speech, I gleaned enough to state earlier:
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Trump has no vision. Only recycled sound bites from presidential campaigns since 1968. Expect in one of the debates, he’ll pull out, “the question is are you better off today than four years ago?”
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Not wrong. Observationaly. But in the hands of a real writer (and a lot of attention to details and history), this is what it looks like:
… It was a relentlessly negative speech, pure horror movie, with constant references to murder and destruction. If you bought any of it, you probably turned off the tube ready to blow your head off.
But it wasn’t new, not one word. Trump cribbed his ideas from the Republicans he spent a year defaming. Trump had merely reprised Willie Horton, Barry Goldwater’s “marauders” speech, Jesse Helms’ “White Hands” ad, and most particularly Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” acceptance address, the party’s archetypal fear-based appeal from which Trump borrowed in an intellectual appropriation far more sweeping and shameless than Melania’s much-hyped mistake.
He even used the term “law and order” four times, and rehashed a version of Nixon’s somber “let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth” intro, promising to “honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.”
In place of Nixon’s “merchants of crime,” Trump spoke of 180,000 illegal immigrants roaming the countryside like zombies, hungry for the brains of decent folk.
…The tragic story of Sarah Root, killed by a released immigrant, was just Willie Horton without the picture.
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Billmon:
In my next life, I want to be able to write like Taibbi.
Me: In my next life, I want to be able to write like Billmon. (As the step from me to Billmon is likely a bigger one than the step from Billmon to Taibbi, it’s within the dream realm of the possible. Like Taibbi is a fantasy too far for me.)