Political conventions and pundits who analyze them are frauds

I found myself swearing and screaming at the TV. A hack of a congresswoman from Wisconsin named Tammy Baldwin was telling the world that John Kerry would solve any problem our mighty nation faces. From giving everybody health insurance to defeating the sneering terrorists to making our children geniuses, Kerry would do it, Tammy said.

A stump of a U.S. Senator, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, looked angry and shouted about how great Kerry was and how he would fix everything.

Rev. David Alston described Kerry as the rich boy version of John Wayne, openly inviting the North Vietnamese to shoot at his aluminum can navy patrol boat and charging through explosions, smoke and bullets at the Godless commies, all in defense of poor people.

Bill Clinton, the nation’s former sexpot-in-chief, gave us the vision of a young John Kerry demanding that the nation send him to every troubled spec of the world so he could beat the bad guys, soothe aching consciences, feed the hungry and get the French to like us again.

By the time they had finished I was convinced that Kerry was the man—the president who would lead us to greatness while softening my water, removing the stain from the toilet bowl and keeping me sober. And I was ready to go out and vote for him.

But then I caught myself and realized that not a single word of those speeches was sincere, that none of this was spontaneous, that every last detail was scripted, that every word was contrived by a speech writer for maximum effect and to make Kerry look like the superman that neither he—nor anybody else—is, and that this was a giant infomercial for the Democratic Party and for its presidential nominee John Kerry.

And then it hit me that even though Tammy had delivered her speech in an uninspired, robotic-like manner that was worse than awful, the slobbering, loyal Democratic Party goofs in the Boston convention center were lapping up every word and gazing at her as if she were the very essence of oratorical genius.

“You pathetic losers!” I shouted. “Stop your blind adoration.”

But I got angrier when the idiot pundits and historians from PBS’s News Hour started “analyzing” the speeches and what effect they would have on the public, meaning people like me.

When Democratic Party apologists and overall buffoon, columnist Mark Shields started yipping about how effective the speeches were, I started swearing. When News Hour host Jim Lehrer nodded at Shields and pretended it was all legit and that his analysis was deep and meaningful, I started throwing shoes at the set.

“You pretentious frauds!” I screamed. “There’s nothing meaningful taking place here and there’s nothing to analyze except that this is an hours-long infomercial, devoid of any substance, drama, surprise, spontaneity, sincerity or honesty. It’s nothing but a fraud and you should be telling us that.”

When the News Hour’s historians came on and began comparing and contrasting the convention to gatherings in the 1800s and early part of the twentieth century, I threw the dog through the TV set.

I had had enough phony news.

You can’t blame the political parties for having turned presidential nominating conventions into four-day-long infomercials. Politics is nothing but gang warfare waged by people in more expensive clothes than the glowering gangbangers wear. Their mission is to win, not to tell the truth or truly care about the good of the nation. The TV networks give them the free time to put on a commercial, and they take it.

But the so-called analysts and pundits are disgraces. They shouldn’t be pretending that a convention that is contrived and fabricated is “news.” It isn’t.

Rather than pimping for the Democratic Party, Shields should be pointing out the contradictions in the speeches. Former President Jimmy Carter talked about the need for the U.S. to respect human rights, and then he dumped on the war in Iraq. Was rescuing a nation of 25 million from a fiend who butchered and killed more than a quarter of a million of his own people not an act of great humanitarianism?

The former chief sexpot said it was awful that we couldn’t dictate labor laws and working conditions to the Chinese. Yet the Democrats constantly decry the Bush administration’s alleged efforts to dictate everything to the rest of the world. Couldn’t some of these people point out the contradiction?

For several decades, most Democrats have loathed the U.S. military, and they cite the Vietnam War as the nation’s greatest moral failure. Now they’re celebrating the fact that their presidential candidate spent a few months fighting there. Couldn’t Shields or David Brooks or any of the historians point out the hypocrisy there?

And then there was Tammy’s terrible speech.

Couldn’t one of these analysts tell the truth and say that it was awful?

No, they couldn’t.

And it’s not because they’re incapable of recognizing hypocrisy and fraud when they see it. They see it and they know exactly what is going on.

But they choose to ignore it because they’ve turned into frauds themselves.


©2004 Dennis Domrzalski All Rights Reserved