Miller couldn’t have been speaking from the heart. He had to trade that in to get into the convention, like all the rest of them…
Cheddarsnax, I am glad you posted those quotes. When that video starts circulating, I’ve gotta get a copy.
This is beautiful. This convention couldn’t be going any better. Last night was marked by calling people with concerns about a fragile economy “girlie men.” Pair this with the quote from Thomas Donohue that people whose jobs have been offshored should “Stop whining”, and the American people really see where this party is coming from.
Then you have the Bush off-spring uniting conservatives and liberals alike in cringes.
Throw in some mockery of the Purple Heart for good measure.
Tonight you get Pat Buchanan redux, with the benefit of the key note speaker challenging members of the media to a steel cage death match!
Oh, I had hoped their convention would go this well, but wow, to see it coming to fruition is sweet indeed!
Did “Anakin” Miller’s speech contain anything other than outrageous slander against John Kerry and insipid praise for Bush?
Since when does lying like a shag carpet qualify as “speaking from the heart?”
[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian
Oh, I had hoped their convention would go this well, but wow, to see it coming to fruition is sweet indeed![/QUOTE]
Of this we are in agreement. I’ll predict a 2-3 point bounce after the convention.
That’s not the speech he gave. I tried watching it but when he started lamenting about how national security should be a bipartisan issue as he bashed Kerry on national security I started laughing so hard I had to turn it off. Of course, I’m not the type of person the speech was directed at.
Atrios captures in two simple pictures what America got to see tonight.
That comment addresses the OP debate topic. If Zell can be shown to be a “bald faced” liar on many points in his speech, that would definitely argue that he doesn’t “speak from the heart”. I’m still learning the rules of the SDMB, so forgive the following off-debate comments:
I don’t think that message boards and blogs pointing out errors of fact in Zell’s speech will get many undecideds who may have been moved by his speech to get back on the fence, for three reasons: 1) the media won’t expose these errors, 2) the Kerry campaign won’t expose these errors, 3) not enough undecideds read boards and blogs to notice.
I’m concerned that the Kerry campaign has been derelict in addressing misrepresentations of Kerry’s comments, positions, and votes. The “sensitive” comment that was taken WAY out of context and apparently scored some points for the Republicans was left basically unaddressed by the Kerry campaign. The whole Swiftboat thing, which apparently did in fact “work” (5 national polls taken just before the RNC showed Kerry losing ground in August), was not vigorously addressed (no 5-minute summation of why those guys are full of shit was ever presented by any Kerry man that I ever saw on cable news interview shows).
It seems like the Democrats are taking the same approach they did in 2000, namely “let Bush defeat himself, the American public is smart enough to see that he is a pathetic candidate.” Well that didn’t work in 2000 and I don’t think it will work in 2004.
I was undecided until the Swiftboat thing came up, but I didn’t get “decided” until I did my own research into Kerry’s Vietnam and post-Vietnam experience and decided that I liked him and his moral conviction. I had to put a lot of effort into Googling and blog-reading in order to make that decision; I certainly wasn’t helped in my decision by the Kerry campaign. Otherwise I’d still be thinking Kerry is a bloody waffler and quasi-traitor and wants to defend America with spitballs.
Overall, what Zell Miller achieved tonight is what the Kerry campaign needs to emulate, imo. Attack! Show them they are full of shit and hammer it home again and again and again. Where’s the democratic counterpart to Karl Rove?
Kinda makes you think the democrats are a bunch of pussies. Hmm.
How can anyone watching this convention conclude that the Republicans of this year are a bunch of nasty, arrogant dickheads? Miller’s speech was incoherent in the same way many of the speeches were: they simultaneously tried to praise the idea of not politicizing an issue… while politicizing it shamelessly in the midst of one of the most negative, nastiest, most partisan political conventions in recent history. In the entire night, there was not a single coherent criticism of Kerry’s policies or platform. Instead, they attacked by proxy: trying to use statements about utterly contextless actions, most of them false descriptions anyway, as stand-ins for his actual record. John Kerry doesn’t talk about his years as Lt. Gov? Uh, then why is it featured on all his campaign videos?
Tie that in with the litany of anti-gay bits (no Mary Cheney, Santorums bile, the Lt. Gov’s sneering reference to gay marriage), and this was probably the lowest the Republican party has sunk to in a long, long time. Well, there’s always tommorow.
I’m starting to think both campaigns are using basically the same tatic:
Dem’s - Anybody but Bush
Pub’s - I’m not Kerry
No, it’s not pussiness. The problem is, we have these emotion called guilt and shame. We don’t LIKE lying or playing dirty anymore. It’s a real weakness of ours.
Please… :rolleyes:
Wow. That much? Well, that is a pretty darn high bar you set there. But, jeez, if you do get that kind of bounce, we sure will have to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Yikes! There went any hope I had of getting a good night’s sleep tonight.
I agree with Andrew Sullivan.
Did you Republicans not notice that he accused anyone voicing any dissent to this administration of treason? How is this acceptable? You know, I always considered myself moderate. I don’t like how the war is being handled and I believe that Bush’s policies are causing us to be less safe in the long run. So now I’m told I’m a traitor.
I’m a MOR swing voter, and we get to decide who’s the next President. The Miller speech came off as so angry and furious, I have to agree with H the B’s conclusion as it doing more Buchanan like damage than good, and then to follow up with Cheney’s acidity was stupid. The Republican’s are shooting themselves in the foot with this raw meat for the true believers stuff being publicly aired. It has the acrid, sweaty odor of vicious desperation.
If they keep this up Kerry will be the next President.
Huh. And here I thought rabies was fatal. Learn something every day.
Well, neither did the Dems get much of a bounce. There just aren’t that many undecided out there this time; and damn straight, better roll up the sleeves.
I would bet more, 3 to 6 points, maybe more. Lies work, slander works. Americans are naive and trusting, they believe that if you say it on TV, it must be true, otherwise its against the law. They believe that thier leaders wouldn’t tell them a whole string of bald-faced lies just to keep thier grubby mitts on the levers of power. No matter how many times you prove it to them, they go back to believing it.
But they do catch on, takes a while sometimes. Bush has been on a long, slow slide ever since his Fearless Leader image began to fade. Week by week, down, down, down. The news ain’t about to get better.
So the question becomes: will they get enough bounce to last all the way to November?
Lets look at it this way. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, you’re traveling by rowboat, a gallon of water and a box of Cheetos…
I am a Kerry supporter. The post you responded to was long and semi-incoherent, I admit. But my point was that the Kerry campaign seems very weak in attempting to seize those voters that are going to decide this election.
Zell Miller’s speech damn near put me into an inconsolable fetal position on the floor, since I suspect the Kerry campaign will not respond to such a jingoistic (and moving) attack in any meaningful way.
Look, the people I work with and the friends that I associate with are all “decided”. The only “undecided” I know of is my father, and he has been uncharacteristically philosophical about this election. He is a career Army man (retired colonel) who started his career as a doctor patching up Vets pouring in from Vietnam at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii in the late 60’s.
My father has never voted Democratic in his whole life, but he was contemplating it the last time we spoke (about 2 weeks ago). He is extremely alarmed by the seemingly irrational application of the US military into Iraq, but he is also understandably concerned about terrorism and anti-american militism. He is the sort of person who is inclined to be swayed by the type of speech Miller gave.
I believe that a strong counter-attack by the Kerry campaign might keep him thinking, but I don’t see such a counter-attack in the cards, judging from the Kerry campaign’s strategy so far. Maybe the gloves come off in September and October. I hope so. Your quote above suggests that the Kerry base doesn’t even want to bother.
Hence, the “pussy” comment.
Zell: I just had a sandwich this big!
Dick: You got a sandwich?! You bastard! I didn’t get a sandwich!