District Attorney Arthur Branch, reporting for duty

So now that the conventions are over, most of the coverage I’ve seen seems to agree that the DNC was a success, even if that’s meant in an insulting way, like being elite or popular. I would have to disagree. I think there were a few things missing. Of course there is the obvious: I saw way too many delegates dancing, but never saw the Biden and Obama families take the stage to do the cupid shuffle together. Whatever. You can’t make time for everything.

I was furious, however, to see that the RNC spanked the DNC when it came to how many speeches they let Fred Thompson give. Nobody noticed it, but it was a gem. Here’s some of my favorite talking points:

• Palin is “a breath of fresh air,” for all the same reasons that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are total shitheads, along with the fact that
  
• She can field-dress a moose. Probably won’t hear that from the mainstream media.
  
• This, of course, is a direct benefit of nominating someone with the kind of small town values that make democrats wanna stop burning vouchers just long enough to rip out an honest working man’s fetus with gay marriage . . . socialism.
  
• She got these small town values in the same place that she gained valuable experience as the “governor of the largest state of the union.” It's so big, in fact, that its slightly less than 700,000 total citizens (1/4 the population of Chicago) still only represent a population density of 1.2 people per square mile. Being in charge of that much empty space is only one of her Alaska-derived credentials. She also has national security experience that can only come from being close to Russia in a strictly geographical sense.

• “She’s a courageous, successful reformer that’s not afraid to take on the establishment.” He couldn’t be more correct on this one. She resented the establishment so much that she wanted to secede from it. Damn beltway insiders from her party, doing whatever it is they do.
  
• After he noted that she’s not afraid to take on the establishment, Thompson asked, “sound like anybody else we know?” and a passionate audience member shouted, “Yes!”
  
• I assume he's referring to McCain here, whom he later identifies as a rebel by virtue of his absurd number of demerits at the naval academy and escapades with women of ill repute. What a stinker. He practically spit in Washington's face five percent of the time with his votes against the GOP, and might very well have done it more if he had showed up to vote on the other 2/3 of the proposals issued at the time.
  
• “When Palin and John McCain get to Washington, they’re not gonna care how much the alligators get irritated, they’re gonna drain that swamp.” Conservatives like to point out that all of Obama’s calls for change are empty rhetoric. Here we have a concrete plan for how to bring about reform: drain the swamp, alligators be damned. And it will happen when John McCain gets to Washington, where he has been for several decades, but he’s not an alligator because who cares if the alligators get mad. This is a party that can do without rhetoric entirely.
  
• “This man, John McCain, is not intimidated by what the polls say or what is politically safe or popular.” Being popular is stupid.
  
• “The respect McCain is given around the world is not because of a teleprompter speech designed to appeal to America’s critics abroad.” Fuck America’s critics abroad, who deeply respect John McCain for his statesmanship. And fuck teleprompters, as per the words written on Fred Thompson’s teleprompter.
  
• ~1:30 into the speech “We take a different view from those in the other party. Listening to them you’d think that we’re in the middle of a great depression, that we’re down, disrespected, incapable of prevailing against challenges that face us . . . We know that we live in the freest, strongest, most generous, and prosperous nation in the history of the world”
• ~20:15 into the speech “There has never been a time in our nations history, since we first pledged allegiance to the American flag [1892] when the character, judgement, and leadership of our president was more important. Terrorists, rogue nations developing nuclear weapons, an increasingly belligerent Russia, intensifying competition from China, spending at home that threatens to bankrupt future generations, for decades an expanding government increasingly wasteful and too often incompetent . . .”
  
• “Obama would match up well with the history-making, democrat controlled congress. History making because it’s the least accomplished and most unpopular congress in our nation’s history.” Being popular is important when it comes to congress. I remember reading a similar indictment (except that it offered evidence) of the republican-controlled congress whose term aligned with an unpopular president that didn’t veto every important bill. One character common to both of those congresses is John McCain.
  
• You can’t correct an economic downturn catalyzed by tax cuts by repealing the tax cuts. See this rationale confuses me, which is why I’m not qualified to be president. Perhaps an over-simplified analogy to help me understand . . .
  
• “Our opponents tell us not to worry about their tax increases. They tell you they’re not going to tax your family. No, they’re just going to tax businesses . . . They say they’re not gonna take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the other side of the bucket.” Now buckets are something I understand, like swamps, and the nation’s economy is most accurately modeled by a bucket of water, which represents money. You can’t take money from just one side of a bucket, because buckets are round, and money automatically flows from you to a business when the business side of the bucket is taxed. What happens to water removed from the bucket by the gubbament? Well, I just I don’t know. Clearly it’s not part of the market anymore. Otherwise it would still be in the bucket, evenly distributed among everyone in the bucket.
  
• “That’s their idea of tax reform.” I actually don’t remember Obama ever mentioning a bucket. Probably got lost in his empty rhetoric. Meanwhile, Americans are stuck wondering how their median income dropped when Bush stopped taking water out of the bucket and the vast number of unemployed people were no longer partaking of the water in the bucket.
  

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when the GOP is attacking itself by mentioning all of the opprobrium associated with Washington politics as usual. I don’t see how they could possibly be mad at anyone else. Anyways, I appreciate Fred Thompson’s sense of irony about his party, which is as subtle as his genius approach to capitalist market systems. That’s the kind of political acumen you can’t expect from someone as inexperienced as Obama, though Palin seems promising.