Crawling in my ski~in! These wounds don’t seem to he~al!
John H. Fund, National Erase:
Dinosaur Conventions
So how bad was the Republican National Convention?
Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):
- WAAAAAHHHHHHH! Having conventions is like double Hitler! Can we just retroactively decide we didn’t have one? Or better yet that we didn’t have to have any pretenses to democracy at all? WAAAAAAHHHH!
It’s been what? Less than a week since the Republicans attempted to have their big marketing push for The Smiler and his vat-grown VP candidate? And not even the paid hacks can manage to spin it as anything other than a catastrophe?
Apparently there’s a lot of paid whores for the GOP looking at this upcoming election much like a deer looks into the headlights of an oncoming truck.
‘The closest thing to eternal life is a government program,” Ronald Reagan once said. I suspect that today he might single out the $136 million in taxpayer subsidies that go to the two major parties for their national conventions. Established in the 1970s when people thought conventions might still decide something, the subsidies keep flowing and are even indexed for inflation. They now amount to welfare for corporate and union interests and the political class — providing the infrastructure for wheeling, dealing, and frolicking.
Established in the 1970s. First appearing in 1832 as the replacement for the caucus system. Same thing, right?
Fuck, we’ve had National Conventions longer than we’ve allowed filthy regular people select our presidential candidates. But thanks for dog-whistling Jimmy Carter so loud it made a couple of the racists in the front go deaf.
Few people suggest that the parties should abandon conventions completely, but the subsidies prop up an archaic structure that needs retooling.
Uh huh. We’re not saying that we want a return to the smoky bars where Party Bosses decided the candidates with nary a thought to the electorate. All we’re saying is the current system needs reforms.
You know? The same reforms that Social Security and Medicare need, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
“Some pundits lament the demise of the old conventions,” writes Michael Barone, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. “But they couldn’t be revived without banning long-distance telephone, the Internet, and jet travel.”
…We could have “old conventions” if we made it impossible for any outside the super rich could possibly attend? That doesn’t even…
To be fair, there’s going to be a lot of that this post. John Superfund jumps around more than a long-jumper with icy-hot-soaked shorts. I think he thinks that this will somehow hide his panicked sobs as he imagines the inevitable comparison of the Democrat’s public-filled stadium convention to their heavily-controlled parade of racists and doddering old white men.
Spoiler alert? It will not.
For most voters, the conventions today are increasingly an anachronism. Only 14 percent of people told pollster Scott Rasmussen that they wanted more than the nightly one hour of prime-time coverage the broadcast networks aired.
What does that even mean?!?
There’s poorly worded poll questions by sketchy organizations and then there’s Dadaist experiments in free-form performance art.
Even with such limited coverage, ratings were down 30 percent or more this year from the 2008 Republican convention. Only one in five unaffiliated voters bothered to tune in for more than a few minutes.
If there was no better sign that the Republican Party needs to shut down the few thin remaining scraps of democracy it allows its constituents, I don’t know what it is.
…Actually, I think that’s his straight up argument here…
In theory, about three-quarters of the taxpayer funding is earmarked for security, but that money is fungible — it makes the two overblown extravaganzas possible. Security for presidents, vice presidents, congressional leaders, and presidential nominees is paid for separately by the Secret Service and is provided wherever those figures go.
Some political players are blowing the whistle and challenging the taxpayer subsidies.
Yes. They are “blowing the whistle” now. Like right this second. It’s almost like they want to prevent something from happening that will happen very soon and the inevitable comparisons it will draw to, say, some not described event where a senile actor ranted at an inanimate chair. Hypothetically speaking.
Cause yeah, arguing that Barack Obama isn’t allowed to campaign against your candidate really is the only hope the Republican Party has left at this point.
The original Smiler may have won against The Beast, but your Smiler is going against black Mr. Rogers. This was never going to be competitive even before you started scoring own goals and testing post-reality campaign styles.
Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), a deficit hawk,
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Hee hee ho ho ho oh wow. Thanks John, I haven’t laughed that hard in ages.
calls the gatherings “summertime parties” and says having them financially fend for themselves would demonstrate “strong leadership to getting our budget crisis in control.”
Yeah, hands up anyone who thinks he was saying remotely the same thing when Sarah Palin was enjoying her post-convention bump in 2008?
Fuck, hands up anyone who thinks any of these “deficit hawks” gave one fuck about all the “public money” going to party conventions before the Republican Party found a way to invent a negative convention bump?
Yeah, pretty much.
Hey, dickwads! Not televising your failures won’t make it any less apparent that you are a party of old out-of-touch white men bristling in pure rage at the “young ‘uns and niggers destroying the country”.
Exposed to sober analysis, the practice of lavishing taxpayer-funded largesse on convention luminaries cannot be justified when the public is in uproar over abuses such as the General Services Administration’s spending $823,000 on a “team building” meeting in Las Vegas.
Well, yes, people do tend to get a little upset when public money is used to pay for someone’s public bender and prostitute bill.
Your point?
Cause from here, all I’m hearing is:
“WE PAID HOW MUCH FOR CLINT EASTWOOD TO BECOME A NATIONAL JOKE?!? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH US!”
And let’s be honest. That’s pretty much the take-home message from that paragraph.
Indeed, it appears that conventions are slowly shrinking in length — if only because of intervention from Mother Nature.
Whoa, whoa. Hold up there, Sally.
Are you seriously, seriously using a single data-point to argue a trend?
Yes, this current Republican National Convention was delayed a day because some dipshit forgot that it’s Hurricane Season in Florida. But that’s not a trend. That’s just a regular old fuckup.
Much like these concern troll arguments against conventions. If they last to next presidential election, I’ll be shocked. Fuck, I’ll be shocked if they last longer than the Democratic National Convention.
In 2008, Representative David Dreier of California, the Republican convention’s parliamentarian, developed an alternate plan under which all the legally required business at that year’s convention in St. Paul, Minn., could be conducted in a few hours in the event that the delegates and officials from the Gulf Coast had to go home to deal with Hurricane Gustav. This year, Democrats will conduct their business in three days instead of four. Republicans in Tampa found they could chop off a day from their schedule of activities with hardly anyone’s noticing.
Some politicians say conventions would shrink even more were it not for the government subsidy.
Government shrinking til’ we drown it in the bathtub, blah blah, growing fat on the public money teat…
I’m sorry, but is there an inebriated ape on the planet that doesn’t find this crap transparently pathetic? Conventions are each party’s attempt to “put on their best face” before the election season turns into the final sprint. Most of the money spent on the “spectacle” comes from the same handful of rich fuckers it usually does.
Again, no one gave a fuck about the miniscule drop in the bucket that was the legal public funding for conventions (mostly in place to give third parties the illusion of being legitimate contenders in the election) before the Republican Party spent who knows how many millions of dollars reminding everyone why the GOP is literally that crazy uncle you avoid at Thanksgiving.
“The staging overshadows the politics,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) told a group of National Review editors last week
Yes, the party whose convention strategy consisted of seeing if a campaign strategy entirely composed of disconnected market-tested buzzwords could work is suddenly complaining about “staging overshadowing politics”.
But not because the strategy failed or because they want to set up an argument that Obama having a convention is proof he’s a demon-possessed Kenyan Marxist from Mars.
No no no!
They are just deeply, deeply concerned about the important political issues of the day being glossed over.
Like women’s rights and all the politicians arguing against them… eyah, i mean, ooh, maybe the current Great Depression and how the Republicans have been deliberately making things worse to help their 2012 chanceeeeee. Bad example. Maybe… no, not that, that’s right out…
No no, we’ll come up with something. Promise. Probably about November 7th or so. But in the meantime, we just wanted you to know how deeply deeply concerned we are about this… since about 4 days ago.
Count House Speaker John Boehner as another skeptic: “These are very expensive propositions to put on,” he told a group of reporters at a Christian Science Monitor lunch last week. He predicted that both Republicans and Democrats “will assess whether this type of convention is worth the tremendous resources put into it.”
I’ll go further: Whoever is elected president this November will have to go through such stringent belt-tightening when it comes to discretionary budget items that the convention subsidy will land on the chopping block. Any political party that dares to oppose getting rid of the subsidy will be in the crosshairs of voters.
So maybe Reagan will be proved wrong after all and the convention subsidy won’t be eternal. All of us will then discover that the two major parties and their allies can pay for whatever kind of convention makes sense to them without taxpayers having to foot much of the bill. Indeed, that’s just the way it was done from the time when the first convention was held — in 1832 to nominate Andrew Jackson — right up through the 1970s.
Oh now you remember that conventions have been around for nearly 200 years. Shame that the first one wasn’t Andrew Jackson, but was actually for the “Anti-Masonic Party”. But hey, why bother subjecting yourself to the strenuous task of looking something up on Wikipedia when you’ve got a page of full-bore concern troll and bullshit faux-deficit-hawkery to shove onto the tubes.
Don’t worry, though, the desperate half-remembered inaccurate factoid thrown on the end doesn’t at all ruin the delicious tang of your hyperventilating crying jag.
Oh but that this were but the beginning of a long dark winter for the 27% as they languish in obscurity never to fuck over our country or our planet again…
I scarce dare dream.
In the meantime however, let me tip the lemon juice all over their self-inflicted wounds.
Aah, what melodies it makes.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Apparently the fallout from the RNC is unlocking my inner sadist. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
*P.S. What the Flying Fuck?!? Okay, wingnuts, sit down.
I know. I know you are really really pants-shittingly terrified about how you’re going to make The Smiler look like a Regular Joe when he can’t even pretend to act like a plebian millionaire, but really? Really?!? Ripping off Soviet propaganda?!?!?
Cause… wow. Just wow.
