Mike Huckabee
So, if someone spews propaganda for two hours and nobody hears it, did they make a sound?
Last night, the Democrats officially kicked off their “virtual convention,” and the results were…underwhelming. I don’t think that’s a partisan reaction. If you’re a true masochist, here’s the entire thing that you can watch on YouTube (incidentally, it was a bad idea to allow people to post comments):
That live stream went on for over two hours. Michelle Obama alone talked for over 18 minutes. But even the Party’s lapdog media at NBC could only scrape up 5-1/2 minutes of “highlights.” (It was a bad idea to allow comments on this video, too.)
And if you want the most entertaining recap of the evening, go to PJ Media’s live-blog, scroll all the way to the bottom, and read back up toward the top.
Stephen Green of PJ Media nailed the problem, writing, “What the Dems are selling requires exuberant crowds of people who aren't thinking too clearly about the longterm. That's a very difficult sell to make when staring into a webcam, sitting in front of a green screen.” There’s also only so much entertainment value you can inject when your Hollywood leftist celebrities are beaming in to lecture us on our privilege from their $20 million gated mansions. Green also described it aptly as the "'Star Wars' Prequels of conventions: Badly-directed big-name actors shoved in front of green screens to recite horrible lines they aren't invested in at all."
Steve Guest caught a hilarious clip that perfectly summed up the audience reaction: CNN cut to a family representing “viewers at home,” and they all looked as if they were about to doze off and tumble off the couch until they obviously got an off-screen cue and snapped awake and started clapping.
Granted, it was always going to be hard to rev up the base when everyone was literally phoning it in (note to “Beto” O’Rourke: that’s what “literally” means. Trump is not “literally” tearing apart the fabric of America, unless he’s going around ripping the pockets off of everyone’s shirts.) I doubt that the GOP Convention will be as exciting as it normally would be, either, although I imagine Donald Trump will muster a lot more showmanship than this stink burger. Our resident pop culture historian Pat Reeder said it reminded him of midcentury movie director Sam Woods, who told his actors before every take, “Go out there and sell ‘em a load of clams.” He said he could not only see the intense sales effort but practically smell the clams through his computer monitor. He also wondered who would actually watch this, noting that he is paid to watch it, then adding, “But not enough.”
I wonder how many people did watch it, considering the platforms showing it were so split up. Bryan Preston, one of bloggers for PJ Media, noticed that 1250 people were viewing it on the game stream platform Twitch, while “a stream of a guy playing (the three-year-old game) Horizon Zero Dawn has more than 23,000 viewers.”
Some of the lowlights for me, in no particular order: At least they did start off by playing the National Anthem, but they had to tell viewers that they may stand or kneel, whichever is their preference… They also had a prayer, which is odd considering their long-running war on prayers at all other public gatherings, even to the point of booing an attempt to reinsert God’s name into their platform at the 2012 convention…Paying lip service to Black Lives Matter and defending all those “peaceful protesters” who are burning down Democrat-run cities, but showing no respect to the police who are being killed and injured when they try to stop the riots (then again, Biden learned how it goes over with the far-left wing when he says anything even mildly complimentary about police:
…Repeating with great passion several long-debunked lies, like claiming that Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax”…And all the crazy conspiracy nuttery about how Trump is “dismantling” the Post Office (nobody ever complained about the Post Office before Trump was elected, and he’s obviously responsible for the 12,000+ mailboxes that were removed in the last five years of the Obama Administration)…
Here are a few moments worthy of more detail…
* Claiming that Joe Biden knows how to handle a pandemic because we all didn’t die of Ebola: Ebola was nothing like the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus. It was deadlier but much less contagious. H1N1 (swine flu), which hit during Obama’s term, was contagious, but not nearly as deadly. Good thing, since even one of Biden’s top health advisors admitted that Obama's response was so lacking that it was only by sheer luck that millions of Americans didn’t die. You know, like they predicted would happen under Trump, and when it didn’t, they blamed him for every death anyway.
We also know how Joe would have handled this pandemic, since he attacked Trump as a xenophobe after he shut off travel from China and Europe early on. He also blames Trump for the economic damage caused by the lockdowns, yet he and other Democrats think we should have locked down harder and sooner and stayed locked down longer. So judging by his own words, if Joe had been in charge, we would have had a lot more cases a lot sooner, and the economy would have suffered more and longer. If I’m wrong, then tell me what he would have done differently that would have made things better…Is that crickets I hear?
* Bringing in New York Gov. Mario Cuomo to talk about the coronavirus (which he called – and I am not making this up – the “European virus”) was not good strategery. Maybe they’re still living a few months in the past, when Cuomo’s handling of the virus was being hailed by the media as brilliant, back before people realized what actually happened. Another big lie told last night was that America has the highest per capita COVID-19 death rate in the world. But if New York State were a separate country, it would be #1 by a mile (1688 per million, nearly twice the per capita death rate as #2 Belgium.)
The only possible worse choice during the time of the coronavirus would have been the vastly unpopular and irrationally dictatorial Michigan Governor, Gretchen Whitmer…Oh, wait, she was a speaker. She claimed that “science” will drive Biden’s fight against the coronavirus. You know, like science tells us that the virus spreads in churches, but not at protest rallies. And it only spreads at bars if they serve food less substantial than sandwiches. Science!!
* Presenting John Kasich as an example of a Republican who opposes Trump is like trying to convince us that someone is a bad guy because the bitter former co-worker he beat out for the top job says so. Bonus: Here’s Kasich in 2012 telling us that Biden is a big liar.
* My writers said of Michelle Obama’s speech that it was infuriating for its dishonesty, but they had to give whoever wrote it props for persuasive ability. They found it to be the best-crafted pack of lies, distortions, historical revisionism, and scaremongering of the entire evening, and that’s not meant as faint praise just because all the rest were so clumsy and obvious. Making the theme “going high” while repeatedly going low was quite ingenious speechcraft. However, they did notice that while she mentioned Joe Biden by name 14 times, two words never crossed her lips: “Kamala Harris.”
Of course, the mainstream media figures are in full-out worship mode. Rachel Maddow declared that at MSNBC, once Michelle started talking, “none of us breathed for 18 minutes." That would explain the brain death.
You know a political convention isn’t a hit when the most talked-about and memed moment was the astonishingly large wall of fireplace logs behind Bernie Sanders, which drew far more interest than his speech (and was less wooden). People were asking if it was fair that one man should have so much firewood? Shouldn’t it be redistributed to people who aren’t privileged to have so much firewood?!
Personally, my theory is that he’s hoarding firewood. He knows that if these people actually get elected, that will be the only fuel available to heat your house.
Update: It's been revealed that the reason Michelle Obama didn't mention Kamala Harris in her speech is that it was recorded before Biden picked Harris as his running mate. Does anyone else wonder if she would have endorsed Joe so heartily if she'd known it wasn't going to be her?