It was extraordinary to see the convention chairman, Mayor Villaraigosa, try to ram through those platform changes yesterday. And succeed in doing so. But dishonestly. Bewildered, he kept having the delegates vote again.
I was reminded of the European Union. Years ago, some countries were given the opportunity to vote on EU membership. When the people said no, the EU made them vote again, until they got it “right.” Remember?
Repeatedly, about half the convention voted for the platform changes, and about half voted against. Then Villaraigosa declared — willy-nilly — that the yes votes were two-thirds of the convention!
That’s what the people were booing about, I think. Maybe they were booing God and Jerusalem tangentially. It suits Republican politics to say they were booing God and Jerusalem (a lovely combination, by the way!) — and heaven knows I want the Republicans to win more than anyone else in the country can possibly do. But I think the delegates were mainly booing the rank dishonesty of the process.
The Danish and Irish repeated referenda were about the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties respectively, not EU membership. But the analogy holds – only I don’t think that the EU has fiddled the count as yet.
You have to admit, it was pretty funny watching(Link) Villaraigosa try to figure out how to manipulate the vote in the direction he wanted. I later saw a photo taken from behind him and off to the side, showing the teleprompter he was reading from which already had the “2/3rds have voted in the affirmative” language on it. He was just following the script. The floor vote was a total sham, but then they always are. This episode just made that completely transparent to everyone.
Beautiful – more, please.
Politicians everywhere lost all shame (if they ever had any).
I, for one, am shocked, shocked! Who could even conceive that there would be shenanigans and goings-on involving politicians?
In the case of those EU referenda, I cannot understand how they could possibly get the “correct” result the second time around. Had I voted ‘yes’ in such a referendum and the result had been no, the second time around I would have voted ‘no’ because that was the effing result, what part of it don’t you get? If everyone had done that, the result of the second ballot would have been a landslide no.
Does anyone remember the Labour party having their selections for their candidate for London Mayor, when Ken Livingstone won but they pretended the guy who came second* had won? I forget the details but Livingstone later stood as an independant and got elected. At the time I remember thinking that people had voted for him in part because they were disgusted with the Labour party’s earlier behaviour.
*I’m not sure but I think his name was Frank Dobson.
““You can’t just trot out a brown face or a Spanish surname and expect people are going to vote for your party,” Villaraigosa, who is chairman of this year’s Democratic National Convention, said at a press conference in Tampa.”
Gosh, da (US) Dem’s have turned “opposite (the VERY NEXT)day” into a secret socioty handshake.
It seems to me that the (now iconic) conventioneer seen suffering victimisation of projective-pooping-of-his-underthings after the *ahem* Straw poll “results” were decreed was a “Brown faced” member of the “Arab American” *again ahem* caucas. I’m not sure though, I couldn’t read his shirt.
That floor vote, over what should have been a minor piece of housekeeping, spun hilariously out of control, and gave us some of the only genuine, unscripted political theater in years. This is the “God language” that had people shouting “No!” and booing:
“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.”
Inoffensive, boilerplate, and anodyne were some of the words that sprung to mind when I read it. It’s barely about God at all.
I laughed helplessly as I pictured the scene backstage, bigwigs who didn’t have to wear headsets no doubt screaming at confused headset-wearing underlings. These dummies had the Democratic party in convocation booing God, and rigging the vote about whether God could come and play. Religious websites are citing John 18:13-27 to amusing effect today.
If we have to have political theater, may it always be screwball comedy such as was on display last night.
Boehner did something similar, chairing the GOP convention, by ignoring those who wanted a floor fight about the rules package. That’s not a tu quoque defense of the Democrats, just an observation that the authoritarian rot is pretty well spread around.
A corrupt big city Mayor in charge of the Convention?
Why I am not surprised – even though the Convention is being held hundreds of miles from his city.
And V. is not the only one involved.
Mayor Dead Fish from Chicago (the person who sends out dead fish to his critics – “you will sleep with the fishes” being the mesage) has sent hundreds of his thugs (sorry – the noble members of the Chicago Police Department) to help handle “security” at the Convention.
Of course Chicago does have an out of control murder problem (a murder rate three times that of New York) – but that, seemingly, does not bother the Mayor.
There is also the little problem that North Carolina (where the Convention is being held) is nowhere near Chicago. But that does not bother the Dems either.
Yet the media are treating this Convention as if it were a gathering of saints and angels.
That was also my first thought, PFP. I would say that it supports the observation that the two major parties have become much more similar than they like to pretend but it appears that neither party even bothers pretending any longer.
I don’t watch any of that political crap any more, but I had lunch today with one of my old friends who does and he was positively stunned, and delighted, that anything so idiotic could have been put on the air by a major party.
There is a sense of derangement in the air that I haven’t seen since 1968, and I am very concerned at how much more extreme, and possibly violent, the collectivist camp may get as they realize the current regime will not survive the economic problems their policies have either instigated or deepened.
It’s somewhat like watching a Japanese movie in which a ceremonial mass suicide takes place in response to a code almost incomprehensible to someone from the west.
The inner workings of the collective are foreign to me, and their various frenzies are like some theater of the absurd put on by a group of college sophomores who truly believe they have just invented the concept of a live performance.
It is a marvel to behold.
Curious choice of a song to follow the acceptance speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Bz0d2xm7U%26sns=em
The Democrats had to get that through because Jewish people in the US are beginning to wake up to the fact that Obama’s Dem’s are not behaving as though they are sympathetic to the survival of Israel.
If they had not got through the amendment in which they state that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel then the US Jewish people would have really received a wake up call as to the true nature of the current administration.
That it is Israel hostile.
And that Iran is not going to be prevented from getting the bomb.
Remember most votes know nothing of this.
The msm barely covered it.
To often the mistake is made that most people “must” know that the “liberal” elite are corrupt and evil.
Why should most people know?
As for the absurd Mayor of L.A.
Contrary to the Economist magazine (which had a demented article this week about how well American big cities are doing – and how good it was the Democrat Convention showed them the Mayors so wall) LA is a bankrupt and decaying dump.
Mayor V. is not even trying to reverse the decline of the city (after all the more govenrment dependents there are – the more Dem voters, and the more government spending the higher the “GDP” for the Economist magzine to boast about) – so he goes off (thousands of miles) to be the frontman at a Convention – reading lies off a telepropter.