— Bud Norman
Tag Archives: Mia Love
A Good Day, All in All
All the state and local races were close enough that the Democrats around here had great expectations, so it was also nice to see their hopes dashed yet again. Tuesday might not prevent another desultory couples of years, but it did provide some compensatory satisfactions.
— Bud Norman
Feeling the Hate
Being so darned loveable, and hewing so faithfully to a live-and-let-live philosophy of life, we’re always surprised to be reminded how very much some people hate us. Perhaps we shouldn’t take it personally, as many of the people who loudly proclaim their hate for us don’t actually know us at all, but it’s rather disconcerting nonetheless.
Just as the tropical storm Isaac has unleashed a flood of water on many an unfortunate fortunate soul in Louisiana, the Republican National Convention in Florida seems to have caused a torrent of vile emotion among the left that has breached the metaphorical levees of civility and threatens to drown the proceedings in hatred. As registered members of the Grand Old Party, who have consistently voted in its primaries and usually wind up voting for its members, we can’t help feeling a bit offended.
The actress Ellen Barkin, for instance, is hoping that some act of God or another will smite us. She reportedly “tweeted,” in reference to the Republican conventioneers, “C’mon #Isaac! Wash every pro-life, anti-education, anti-woman, xenophobic, gay-bashing, racist SOB right into the ocean!” We’ll admit that we’re not the least bit anti-life, but we very much favor an educational system that will teach people to communicate without resort to numeral signs, we have no quarrel with womankind — only certain women — and we’re not irrationally fearful of foreigners, we haven’t bashed any gays, and we can’t think of anything racist we’ve done lately, but we expect that we’re still Republican enough that she’d like us to see come to hurricane-related harm.
Our pain is slightly alleviated by the realization that we have only vaguest idea of who Ellen Barkin is, and that she’s apparently not the Hollywood hottie such used to be, but we’re stung by the similarly angry death wishes of the somewhat more familiar Samuel L. Jackson. The actor, who specializes in playing angry criminals, took to his “Twitter” account to lament that God had spared the Republicans His angry wrath. Littering his vengeful theology with numerous profanities, Jackson declared the lack of carnage at the convention “unfair shit,” although he later apologized to “God, Tampa, da GOP & Isaac(sp)!,” adding the equally illiterate “Who played the Race card?!”
Racist and sexist though we may be, we were quite taken with the convention speech delivered by Mia Love, a small town mayor and congressional candidate who looked to be both African-American and female. Because Love was speaking at a Republican convention, however, we found that some disapproving on-line vandals had altered a Wikipedia page about her to describe her as a “nigger” and a “whore.” Such language apparently proves one’s anti-racist and anti-sexist bona fides on the modern left, but it struck us as rather rude.
Love wasn’t the only proud black woman being abused at the convention, as no less an impressive person as Condoleezza Rice was subjected to an attempted citizens’ arrest by the radical leftist Code Pink organization, which had already found her guilty of war crimes. Groups such as Code Pink never seem to attempt citizens arrests of dictators such as Saddam Hussein, who killed more Iraqis than Rice ever did, but we suspect that’s because it would entail more risk and less self-righteous satisfaction.
— Bud Norman
About Those Speeches
The art of political oratory has become so degraded in America that Barack Obama was able to pass himself off as a silver-tongued speaker just four years ago, but we still enjoy hearing what passes for speechifying these days. What we heard on the radio Tuesday from the Republican National Convention was mostly pretty good, at least by contemporary standards, and likely to compare well with next week’s efforts by the Democrats.
We missed most of the address by Mia Love, the mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, candidate for congress, and a rising star of the conservative movement, but saw that her address won plaudits from the right-wing commentators and by all accounts “electrified” the crowd. The portion we did hear was indeed rousing, stressing the traditional Republican values of self-reliance and personal responsibility with a convincingly personal touch, and we expect we’ll be hearing more from her in the comings months. Those watching the convention on MSNBC apparently missed all of the speech, as the left-wing network simply cut away from all of the black and Latino speakers lest their audience be confused about why a crowd full of racists were cheering so loudly for a black woman such as Love.
Former Pennsylvania senator and failed presidential contender Rick Santorum also spoke, and while he probably managed to get his many supporters enthused about the Romney candidacy we don’t expect the speech had much appeal beyond his fans. The speech was a strange extended metaphor about hands, starting with the gnarled but strong hands of his coal-mining father and running through the various sorts of hands he shook while campaigning, and although it had some kind words for traditional Judeo-Christian values it was light on the hellfire-and-brimstone stuff that scared the children and the secular reporters during the campaign.
Even the ABC reporters who kept interrupting the speakers on the radio were hard-pressed to find much fault with a rousing speech by the nominee’s wife, Ann Romney, who gave an endearingly personal account of her husband’s career. The main chore facing the Romney campaign, which has been besieged by the most extravagant sort of negative advertising, seems to be convincing the public that he’s not a top-hatted villain who ties damsels to railroad tracks for cackling laughs, and the speech was probably effective at countering that cartoonish image. By hearing it on the radio we missed out on the full effect of her classy good looks, but even so we found it very compelling and just the sort of thing that should have particular appeal to the kind of women who are susceptible to the Democrats’ most outrageous slanders.
Keynote speaker Chris Christie gave a good speech, but that was disappointing because we’d been expecting a great one. The famously burly governor of New Jersey has some heretical views typical of his region, especially on gun rights and radical Islamist jurists, but on the crucial issue of fiscal sanity he’s been heroic, and he’s achieved great things in a stubbornly liberal state by stating the cold, hard facts of life with his legendary bluntness, so it seemed certain that he’d lay it on with extra gusto in a prime time spot. Alas, although he talked about being blunt he failed to do so, and left us wanting more.
— Bud Norman