Who says "strong"?

Joe Klein on Tim Russert's CNBC show this evening:

One thing I'd like to do is check and see how many times the President used the word "strong" or "strength" in his speech ... on Thursday night. I don't think it was very many. John Kerry used it again and again and again. Only someone who, kind of, on some level thinks he's weak or thinks the public thinks he's weak is going to use the word "strong" so often.

This is a good point, but I can't understand why Klein, if he was planning to make this comment, didn't locate the text of the speeches and actually do the count. Here, I'm going to do it, over here on my little blog. Bush said "strong" twice, neither time referring to himself (the references are to the Prime Minister of Iraq and to military families). He said "strength" four times, again, never referring to himself (the references are to Americans, to his wife, to "American strength" (which should be used "to advance freedom"), and to military families). Kerry says "strong" or "stronger" 21 times, also not directly referring to himself, and "strength" five times. That took less than five minutes to figure out. Come on, Klein!

UPDATE: Typo corrected: I had "Joel" for "Joe," as an emailer pointed out. Sorry.

Kerry's late night speech.

I've been trying to capture a clip of John Kerry giving that late night speech after the convention closed on Thursday. I wrote about the NYT article about the speech and made fun of the Times's characterization of the speech as "roaring," so I really wanted to see some actually footage of the event. Why aren't we seeing it? Did he look too ridiculous? I TiVo'd hours of news analysis shows on three cable news networks on Friday, and no one had any film of it.

Anyway, I was just looking for the text of his remarks, which I didn't find, but I did find an additional quote from the speech that struck me:

"With two months to go, the choice could not be more clear," the statement continued. "A president who sides with the special interests or the Kerry-Edwards team who will put middle-class families first."

When and why did we start assuming that government should "put middle-class families first"? Why not children? Why not lower class people who would like to make it into the middle class? Or is "put middle-class families first" now what politicians say to oppose those they accuse of putting the "wealthiest Americans" first when they are afraid of making of voters worry that tax money will be channeled to the underprivileged? (And it's always "families" now. Has anyone ever heard a politician offer to lift a finger for single people?)

UPDATE: There is streaming video of the event at the C-Span website. So now I've watched it. Kerry seems looser than usual, grinning happily in the beginning. Words here and there are dropped and some words are garbled. At least twice he says "our guntry" for "our country," and he says "I dink" for "I think," and "attack" for "the fact." He refers to "the sunset goin' down"--not to be confused with the sunset goin' up. It's late at night and he may be quite tired. But it's not especially embarrassing. It's not that exciting either. It's a long speech that is basically the stump speech, punched up a few times with references to the Republican Convention. These references are what the press has excerpted and printed in the articles. There's a large banner behind him that reads "A Stronger America Begins at Home." A tad isolationist for my taste. He calls this "the most important election of a lifetime," which of course it is for him, but I'm tired of hearing that assertion. There are plenty of important elections, and it's a distortion to assume the one closest to you is so much bigger than the ones farther away.

The event begins and ends with the blaring of Bruce Springsteen's "No Surrender": "Well, we busted out of class, had to get away from those fools/We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school." Is there a more anti-education song this side of "School's Out" and "Another Brick in the Wall"? I guess he doesn't want to be the Education President. And why would you blast the lyric "had to get away from those fools" just as the two candidates are walking out on stage? Anyway, here's a quiz that made me think up:



ANOTHER UPDATE: The Sunday NYT has a funny collection of old quotes making the "most important election" assertion. The truest quote comes from George W. Bush. Asked by Larry King whether this is "the most important election ever," Bush said "For me it is."

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: The correct answer to the poll is discussed here.

How to film a remake: more character development ... for King Kong.

So you're remaking "King Kong," and you're Peter Jackson. Why remake a classic? Others might say, because of the computerized special effects now available. Jackson's idea is more character development, especially for Kong:

"He's a very old gorilla and he's never felt a single bit of empathy for another living creature," Jackson said.

So a lot of thought has gone into exploring what would happen if there were a relationship between an old, brutalized gorilla and a young woman.

"You introduce this other person into his life which initially he thinks he's going to kill and then he slowly moves away from that and it comes full circle," he said. "That's what we're exploring and its really fun to go into that psychological depth with it."

Who knew Kong was old? So his interest in the girl is of the dirty old man variety. These Hollywood movies: they always put an older male with a much younger female. Or is Jackson going to de-sexualize the story? Maybe a war and peace allegory? Kong is the victim of empire, driven to terrorism. The girl, Ann Darrow, then somehow affects him so that he throws off his terrorist ways (and falls from a tall NYC building). But what is Ann in this War on Terror allegory? The U.N.?

UPDATE: Can you imagine how different the history of the United Nations would have to have been before it would work to have a remake of King Kong in which the building he falls from is the U.N.?

"Barking mad."

I've been trying to chase down the "barking mad" meme. 

Wonkette has a post a couple days ago about Googling "Zell Miller" and "barking mad": only 16 hits at the time, but it was still early. It's up to 74 now. But it's not just a reaction to Zell Miller. 

On "The Daily Show" in mid-August, Maureen Dowd called Dick Cheney "barking mad." Since then, I've been noticing the phrase, which I think is funny, because I have a literal mind, and I picture the person actually barking.

There's a great section of Spalding Gray's "Monster in a Box" where he describes going a bit mad and literally barking. But it seems to have become the standard way to call someone crazy. When did that happen?

I used Nexis to try to trace the meme down, but unfortunately I was using a newsgroup file that included British and Australian newspapers. I could barely see the American examples!

Clearly, the phrase has a British origin. But why the sudden outbreak here? And it's not just that people have gotten crazier lately, so don't try to sidetrack me. I know everyone likes to call people crazy in this election season, especially since "he's crazy" worked to down the most promising of the Democratic candidates in the primaries. Maybe it will work again: Cheney's crazy! Bush is crazy! Wolfowitz! And they're not just crazy, they're barking mad!

I'm going with the suspicion that Maureen Dowd is the American infection point. (Email me if you have another suspect.) Here's the Google result for "barking mad" and "Maureen Dowd." 213 results.

I see she made a big impression a year ago, after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the University of Michigan affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger. She wrote:

The dissent is a clinical study of a man [Clarence Thomas] who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received. It's poignant, really. It drives him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race. Other justices rely on clerks and legal footnotes to help with their opinions; Thomas relies on his id, turning an opinion on race into a therapeutic outburst. In his dissent, he snidely dismisses the University of Michigan Law School's desire to see minority faces in the mix as "racial aesthetics," giving the effort to balance bigotry in society the moral weight of a Benetton ad. The phrase "racial aesthetics" would be more appropriately applied to President George W. Bush's nominating convention in Philadelphia, when the Republicans put on a minstrel show for the white fat cats in the audience.

Ah! But the Maureen Dowd "barking mad" infection point could be traced even farther back, as a Nexis search revealed. I found an October 14, 1999, piece in The San Francisco Chronicle interviewing the writer Edmund Morris (author of the Reagan biography "Dutch") about what he thought about Dowd calling him "barking mad." (He said "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal.")

Well, I don't claim to have solved the mystery of the "barking mad" meme. My sketchy research leads me to think Dowd has only labeled three persons "barking mad": Morris, Thomas, and Cheney.

And she's already dealt with Zell Miller's speech, and she did not call him "barking mad" or even "mad." She said:

Zell Miller, playing Cotton Mather behind the cross-like lectern, made Mr. Cheney seem rational, with a maniacal litany of weapons he said Mr. Kerry had opposed that can destroy any mud hut in any third world country: B-1 and B-2 bombers, F-14A Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, Patriot and Trident missiles, and Aegis cruisers.

She did imply Miller was way beyond "barking mad" though, if he made the "barking mad" Dick Cheney seem rational. I guess Miller was so crazy, in her view, that one cannot speak directly of that craziness but can only indirectly approach the topic with a comparison to another person already established--in Dowdworld--as "barking mad."

And speaking of memes, is it Dowd who got the lectern-looked-like-a-cross meme going? "The Daily Show" used it later the same day. No, here's an earlier reference (in the NYT). I wrote about the lectern on the second day of the Convention, and, though I said it reminded me of a pulpit, I didn't see the cross. But clearly we can't blame Dowd or the NYT for setting off the observation that the lectern looked like a cross. How do I know? Because a Google search using the word "lectern" produced 409 hits, and a Google search trying the misnomer "podium" produced 7,350 hits.

First sign that it's a football Saturday.

I don't go to football games, and I don't keep track of the Badgers' schedule, but I do live about five blocks from the stadium. I'm sitting at my dining room table, next to open windows that look out on my quiet street in University Heights. Rarely does a car even drive down my street, because it's a very slow route: there are stop signs at each end of the block, and it's a two-way street that is so narrow one car has to pull over to let another car pass. So I hear the footsteps and the quiet conversation of anyone who walks by. And they all look in at me. They aren't nosy. People just can't help it. The window is close to the sidewalk, because the front yards are very small in this old neighborhood, in the style that was considered suburban in the early part of the twentieth century. I hear the shuffling footsteps of a slightly large group of pedestrians--maybe six. I look over. I see red and white clothing. Okay, it's a football day. Over the course of the next few hours, the pedestrian traffic will increase, the people will be wearing a lot of red and white, and every parking space on my street will be taken. If I wanted to make fifty dollars, I could repark my car on the street, and let people park up my long driveway. My kids used to do that years ago. Good luck to the Badgers and to all Badger fans. If I hear a cheer drifting over from the stadium, I will feel a mild half-second of pleasure.

UPDATE: This surprised me:

Today, the entire season is already sold out and the Badgers will draw over 81,000 for their 2004 opener against the University of Central Florida. This will mark the 70th consecutive crowd of at least 70,000.

I really had no idea that many people were converging on my neighborhood.

From "gauzy-sounding talk" to "slashing indictment."

The NYT continues its effort to cheer up Kerry supporters. Today's front page piece by David M. Halbfinger tells us that John Kerry has issued "a slashing indictment of President Bush's record on jobs and health care, saying he had misled the United States into war in Iraq and left a trail of broken promises and worsened problems at home." Yes, that indictment really slashes.

Mr. Kerry has for the most part avoided harsh political attacks on the president, instead emphasizing his expansive plans and offering gauzy-sounding talk of sunrises and grabbing onto dreams. But he returned to the offensive after his character, voting history and even his patriotism were questioned by Republicans in New York this week, and after Democrats faulted him for a hesitant, halting response last month to televised attacks on his military record.

You know how gauze sounds, don't you? In fact, some folks would rather listen to "a thin, loosely woven surgical dressing" than the Senator's drone. But don't worry, he's got a whole new approach. He wasn't actually on the offensive before, because he's too big a man to attack the President just as a way of campaigning to defeat him. But now that Bush has dared to question him, now he's going to fight. Isn't it great that the NYT doesn't clutter its print with too many quotation marks, such as around "even his patriotism"? You all know the Republican Convention was an outrageous, low, unfair, personal attack on Kerry's character and patriotism, don't you?

Criticizing the Republican convention as bitter and insulting one moment, then calling Mr. Bush dishonest the next, Mr. Kerry attacked against what he called his rivals' distortions and said the president's address Thursday made clear he "will literally say anything and do anything in order to try to get re-elected" - a line stolen from Mr. Bush, who used it regularly against Al Gore.

Bush absurdly misused the word "literally"?

Unlike bloggers, by the way, the NYT has editors, who polish the writing on every page, but especially make the front page perfect. For example, they won't let a sloppy writer get away with saying "Kerry attacked what he called his rival's distortions" It will be "Kerry attacked against what he called his rivals' distortions," because you need to establish that he didn't "attack for," he "attacked against." Every misplaced apostrophe will be moved to its proper position.

Mr. Kerry was upbeat and feisty on the attack, even noting "this lonely voice over here" of a Bush supporter on the periphery of his rally. When his supporters yelled, "Two more months!" at the man, Mr. Kerry did their barb one better.

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste, ladies and gentlemen," he said, laughing.

Stop, you're literally killing me with these upbeat, feisty barbs!

"Every Picture Tells a Story."

I don't know what got into me, but I'm listening to my vinyl LP of "Every Picture Tells a Story" tonight. "Night time is only the other side of day time."

I think there are a lot of people who first heard "Amazing Grace" here.

The "therefore" symbol.

Have you ever stopped to think about how different everything would be if the "therefore" symbol (a triangle of three dots) were one of the standard symbols on a keyboard like % or # or @? I think we would be more rational, and "the world would be a better place," as Jackie DeShannon once sang ... not about the "therefore" sign, or rational analysis, but ... Jackie DeShannon is a wonderful artist, so when she crosses my thoughts, even to take them astray, I feel like giving her some credit.

UPDATE: Tony Rickey emails html instructions, so let me try:

&there4

But that doesn't satisfy me, because it's still easier to write the word out. And I'm interested in how the long-ago choice of which symbols to put on the number keys has shaped our world. Many years ago, I used to wonder why @ was chosen. Obviously, it was not on the level of & or $ or * as a useful symbol. But then email addresses were created and @ earned its place. But if, instead of @, long ago the choice had been made for &there4 , who can know how things would have turned out?

"Kerry has been given a little favor."

On Fox News this evening a panel of commentators was asked about the supposed problem of Clinton's surgery and Hurricane Frances overshadowing Kerry's attempt to fight back after the Republican Convention. I was struck by Morton Kondrake's response:

I actually think that Kerry has been given a little favor, because ... what Kerry said today diminishes him, actually. His response to this soaring speech ... of President Bush's was a petty, small response, talking about Dick Cheney's draft deferments and how his patriotism had been questioned, which his patriotism had not been questioned. You know, Zell Miller delivered some low blows, but they weren't questioning his patriotism. And for him to start out, out of the box, resuming the campaign, with that as the lead story, I think, would have undercut him. So, he's probably lucky ..."

The interviewer, Brian Wilson--he's good, sitting in for Brit Hume--posited that John Kerry's people were just "crazed" by the Clinton surgery development.

UPDATE: At the end of the interview, Brian Wilson asks the panel which speaker helped Bush the most. Was it Miller? Schwarzenegger? Giuliani? McCain? Everyone on the panel says it was Bush himself. Interesting point not mentioned: the poll they were discussing, which showed Bush with an 11 point lead, was completed before Bush gave his speech.

Coronary bypass surgery.

Instapundit mentions that his grandfather died from complications of early coronary bypass surgery. My grandfather had one of the earliest bypass operations, in, I believe, 1954, and he lived another 15 years as a result. He was fortunate to live in Ann Arbor, Michigan where the surgery was being developed. I'm sorry I don't know the specific history of the development of the surgery. But I remember that my Grandpa Beatty died in 1969, and that the family always said he lived 15 more years because of the new surgery. I remember being a little kid--I would have been 3 in 1954--and seeing my mother prepare to fly to Ann Arbor to see her father, having been told "If you want to see your father alive again," you must come immediately. That said, both of my own parents died in Florida, where, I believe, inferior medical care deprived them of many years of life. In fact, I believe medical malpractice caused both of their deaths. And let me add that no lawsuits were possible. Suffice it to say, I don't cheer when arguments about "frivolous lawsuits" are bandied about. It would be pleasant to believe that there are too many medical malpractice lawsuits, as our President does, but highly disturbing to find out that there are too few. From my personal experience, I feel there are far too few. That said, I also think it is very hard to be a doctor, and mistakes are part of what happens. I am thankful good people go into medicine, even though they will go on to carry the burden of seeing their own mistakes grievously injure people. But there are also people who are not so good, who lay their hands upon human bodies every day. It is easier to whine about lawyers than to think about them.

UPDATE: Regular readers know that I voted for John Edwards in the Democratic primary. This post contains some of the reason why I respect him.

Two things about the Clinton bypass story.

1. It's 8 Central Time, and Salon is still running the retracted story that a Bush crowd booed when the President asked that people pray for Clinton. Drudge has been reporting all afternoon that the booing story was retracted. Instapundit is linking to this. My question: Was the false report an anti-Bush dirty trick or an honest mishearing of the soundtrack? I've heard the clip a few times on radio and on TV, and there is a confusing sound in the beginning of the crowd reaction that might be people saying "no" or something, but there is a positive crowd sound after that and certainly nothing to justify tarring Bush for failing to chide the crowd. It is such an easy dirty trick to go to the rallies of the candidate you don't like and act like a jackass in one way or another.

2. Do you think it's in bad taste to cover the Clinton surgery story in terms of the effect on the Kerry campaign? Two points I've heard more than once on TV tonight: Clinton won't be able to campaign for Kerry and the Clinton story today is messing up Kerry's chance to respond to the Republican convention. New spin potential: Kerry's lackluster campaign is Clinton's fault. Or, what the hell, why not Kerry's poor campaign is the fault of the fast food industry that put Clinton in his current condition? (And I'm hearing similar commentary about the hurricane: everything that happens can be characterized as depriving Kerry of the opportunity to have his message heard, because anything in the news is keeping Kerry from finally getting his chance to speak to us.)

UPDATE: I'm ashamed of myself for thinking about such things, but I wonder if the Kerry and Bush campaign people are brainstorming about how Clinton's death would affect the campaign. Are the Kerry people speculating that a Clinton death would create warm feelings that would radiate onto Kerry and weighing that against the negatives: that a Clinton death would absorb an immense amount of attention and lead to the replaying of Clinton's best moments that would be so obviously more attractive than Kerry? Are the Bush people running through their own version of the analysis? Are they planning ways to revive the Reagan death story and thinking about the beautiful role the current President would play in any Presidential funeral? Sorry. I love Bill Clinton and want the best for him. When Bush said pray for him, I contemplated praying for him. When Kerry said yell for him, I contemplated yelling for him. Good luck to dear, sweet Bill and to everybody, everywhere with a heart problem or any medical problem of any kind.

For Democrats looking for ways to spin the devastating Time poll.

I emailed the link to the Time poll to my son, John Cohen, and he wrote back what seemed to me to be a fine effort at putting the best face on it. So, with his permission, here it is:

Clearly Bush has a really good trajectory. Remember that in 2000 Nader got surprisingly few votes. There might be a lot of people defecting from Nader to Kerry at the last minute out of pragmatism. Nader has 3%; assuming (arbitrarily) that two-thirds of Nader voters will end up defecting to Kerry, then we should consider Kerry to be at 43% right now instead of 41, which would mean we should consider the split among likely voters (which is the headline of the story) to be Bush 51 / Kerry 43. The margin of error is 4%, so that's a statistical tie. (Even if you don't buy my calculation about Nader voters, it's still CLOSE to a statistical tie.) So I would consider this one poll obviously a great sign for Bush, but it's not proof that Bush is in the lead. Bush can only be considered to have a strong lead if other polls corroborate this one.

He adds:

The poll was done from Aug 31 to Sept 2. It will be interesting to see what the numbers are like after the convention. As I've said before, considering that Kerry got almost no bounce from the convention, I think it will be terrible news for Kerry if Bush gets a significant bounce out of his convention, since people's views of Bush are more solidified. If Bush doesn't get much of a bounce out of his convention, then you could say that both conventions were ineffective for reasons unrelated to the specific candidates or parties (the country is polarized, the conventions got relatively little coverage, etc.).

Yes, when Kerry got no bounce, the spin was: conventions don't really produce bounce anymore. So what can you say now? I predict: the Republicans did very bad things at the convention and thereby unfairly obtained the bounce that they got; if they had conducted an honorable convention, like the Democrats, there would have been no bounce.

UPDATE: An emailer observes:

I wanted to note this:  a 51/43 split with a margin of error of +-4 is not a statistical tie.  It does indicate that there is the possibility that there is a statistical tie in the actual populace, but there is no reason to think that the likelihood of this possibility is any different from the likelihood of a 55/39 split in the actual populace (which would render Kerry about as significant as I am in the coming election).  Moreover, neither of those extreme possibilities is as likely as a 51/43 split in the actual populace.  Similarly, rolling a sum of 2 on two dice is as likely as rolling a sum of 12 is, but neither is as likely as 7.  Obviously, the dice rolling is not correlated in the same way that the polling is, and while this correlation does support your son's comment, it does so only weakly.

I agree, definitely. But what I like about my son's comment is that it's amusingly in the vein of what would Susan Estrich say if she had to figure out something positive to say. I'll see if John comes back Estrichishly and re-spins.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If you want to shore up your knowledge of what "margin of error means," go here. And Matthew Yglesias argues about that here. I don't think you really need to invest a lot of time in studying all that, but if you're bummed out about the poll, it might cheer you up. Especially the first link. I'm pretty sure John is literally correct about the meaning of the term "statistical tie." At the same time, the emailer is right about likelihood of different results. But if you were trying to spin the bad news, you would avoid pointing that out. Indeed, I think Yglesias, who supports Kerry, was saying what he was saying because he was enjoying polls that showed Kerry ahead and he didn't want his pleasure spoiled by people wielding the "statistical tie" concept.

Finally getting around to TiVo-blogging last night's convention.

I wasn't really properly simulblogging the Convention last night, and I'm told that I had my priorities straight. Yikes! Going over to Vodkapundit for that last link, I saw this new poll information. Wow! That's distracting me from my plan to watch the TiVo'd night 4 of the Convention. An 11 point lead for Bush now! "57% trust Bush to handle the war on terrorism, while 36% trust Kerry." I'm surprised but also not that surprised. I predicted a landslide for Bush a long time ago. Well, let me nevertheless record a few observations about last night.

1. I was a total sucker for the film about the Bush twins. Showing the home movies is a little exploitative, but they are so damn cute! I like that one of things they love about their dad is that he didn't come around to politics until fairly late in life. That is usually held against him--proof he's a lightweight. But I like the other side of the argument: the best person to trust with power is someone whose psychological makeup does not contain a needy urge toward power. Kerry, of course, is usually portrayed in a positive light for rising into the limelight of leadership early in life, but obviously there is a negative way to portray that history.

2. After all the bad music, they have a really great singer doing "Dancing in the Streets," but the camera can only show her from a distance. She's standing down with the band and is not identified.

3. Seeing the arrival of President Bush's motorcade, I stop and think how good it has been that both conventions (and the Olympics) took place without a terrorist attack.

4. Now Donnie McClure is singing, along with a bunch of really cute kids. He's great!

5. Pataki gives a decent speech. Somebody seems to have coached him in how to use that passionate whipering effect like a cornball actor. Did he say "With supreme guts and rightness"? That's a rather awkward turn of phrase.

6. The short film. The in-person narration--by the sublimely resonant and folksy-sounding voice of Fred Thompson--is very effective. The framework of the film is a series of vignettes about Bush and another man : Bush and the firefighter (he put his arm around him as he did the megaphone speech); Bush and the dead police officer whose badge was given him (and whose mother remains Bush's friend), Bush's invitation of a man who'd lost his leg in the war (the two "ran the track three times, three laps on the White House lawn, and then they just hung out for a while"); Bush and Derek Jeter (Jeter goads him into pitching from the mound, and Bush took up the challenge, not mentioning that he was wearing a heavy bulletproof vest and could "hardly move his arms"). These vignettes convey the message that Bush is a man that admirable, manly men relate to in a very natural way. Bush comes across as modest, compassionate, and manly.

7. After the film two flag panels move across the stage from opposite sides, and after they overlap and pass by each other, Bush is there standing in the center. It looked like a magic trick. Kind of comical.

8. The speech itself is quite good. He is forceful and clear and with almost no flubs--and no embarrassingly funny flubs. Nothing makes me laugh out loud, like Kerry's "senators and menators." That still makes me laugh.

Bush has lots of specific details, making it seem as though he has a well-thought-out plan. Biggest applause line (it seemed to me): "We must make a place for the unborn child." A couple complaints about too many lawsuits. The amendment banning gay marriage is characterized as protecting marriage "from activist judges."

A woman protester is dragged out kicking--we see Bush's face: he winks. I love that calm, subtle confidence, like the time during the debate with Gore, when Gore was weirdly invading his space and he turned to Gore and gave a little friendly-style nod.

His main theme, woven through the domestic and foreign policy: freedom. "Free" or "freedom" appears 23 times in the speech. [And "liberty" appears 11 times.]

I liked this line:

So our mission in Afghanistan and Iraq is clear. We will help new leaders to train their armies, and move toward elections, and get on the path of stability and democracy as quickly as possible. And then our troops will return home with the honor they have earned.

That contains a subtle slap at Kerry, who is attacked for playing a leading role in depriving Vietnam vets of honor when they returned home. I cannot help but think of the Swift Boat Vets criticisms of Kerry, though Bush says nothing against Kerry's war record. The implication seems plain: if Kerry is President, somehow he will arrange things so that Iraq war vets will come home, after all of that effort, and be seen as the bad guys. Bush never says anything like that. But enough was said to make me think that, and I don't believe I'm alone. This passage, somewhat later, made a similar impression:

I've met with parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag and said a final goodbye to a soldier they loved. I am awed that so many have used those meetings to say that I am in their prayers and to offer encouragement to me. 

Where does that strength like that come from? How can people so burdened with sorrow also feel such pride? It is because they know their loved one was last seen doing good because they know that liberty was precious to the one they lost.

Funniest line: "Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called 'walking.'"

9. Minimal balloonage. I think the idea was let's not show off that we can do balloons so much better than they can. Confetti! Upward shooting streamers: the crowd loves them. Bush pays a lot of attention to how Laura feels, I think. It's a big moment, and they all know they really only have to make this look right, and maybe pretending to care about whether she feels okay is part of making it look right, and maybe I'm a chump, but I think he really cares.

The Kerry that roared.

The New York Times begins a news article about a Kerry speech this way:

Roaring back at his Republican rivals, Senator John Kerry called President Bush "unfit to lead this country" for "misleading'' America into war in Iraq and said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney avoided fighting in the Vietnam War.

I didn't hear it. I'm just reading it. But I don't know what it would have been about Kerry's speech that would have constituted "roaring"--aside from the Times's dear wish that Kerry would turn into a lion-like fighter. I suppose it took some courage to bring himself to say the word "unfit," so searingly used against him in recent weeks. But what is this roar? It's this:

"For the past week, they have attacked my patriotism and even my fitness to serve as commander in chief ... Well, here is my answer to them ... I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could've and who misled America into Iraq."

So, your big answer, after all of these attacks, is that you somehow "will not have" any questions. I simply will not have it. You hear that? He does not want to be questioned. He went to Vietnam, and therefore, he simply will not have any questions about whether he has the qualifications to be President. Come on, that's a roar, isn't it?

And by the way, any man who didn't volunteer to go to Vietnam who was of age at the time--all you Baby Boomer men who had student deferments or even if you served in the National Guard, I mean were in the National Guard--you were all refusing to serve.

Give 'em Zell.

I was going to write a post about how a lot of people commenting on Zell Miller's speech the other night took advantage of the Zell/Hell rhyme to go for some easily within reach wordplay, but the first example I found was Jonah Goldberg commenting on how everyone was doing Zell wordplay:

First off, as a journalist, let me take the time to do what no other pundit has been willing to do: thank Georgia Senator Zell Miller for being named Zell. It’s been a long time since a politician offered such euphoria over euphony in political commentary. From the conservatives I’ve already heard “Give ’em Zell!” and “Zell it like it is!” and “Zelling it Old School!,” and from the other side of the aisle we’ve had “Zellotry” and “Zell-out.” Who the Zell knows what else is coming down the pike — Zello-Dolly?

Day 4 of the Republican Convention.

I see that Instapundit advance-linked me, before heading off to a poker game. Yet here I am at Nina's, consuming a glorious gourmet meal, eating the last of the chocolate torte with the cassis creme anglaise, with a glass of cognac. We've put the Bush speech on. There's a little postage-stamp-sized TV on the counter and now we're all blogging. No one is throwing things at the screen. Occasionally, I put in a good word. Nina is saying "Come on, oh, come on!" Anyway, here are some pictures from earlier in the evening. I'll try to get it together to say something more apt about the President's speech later, but my general sense of the speech, overhearing it through a cognac-haze is that he's saying the things he always says with the speech mannerisms he always has.











I've got to say, getting those pictures up, under the influence of the cognac, has been really really hard. I hope you appreciate the look of this dinner party and forgive me for not minutely dissecting the speech. I will need to do that later. Ah! There is our President and Our First Lady all in orange-red. Now, let's just sleep on all of this speech-making, and wake up tomorrow and begin to take the details of all of these arguments seriously.

UPDATE: "There is our President and Our First Lady ..." That was not a subtle allusion to "Is our children learning." That was just me, blogging under the influence! And what's with the religiously tinged "Our First Lady"? What does that mean? I have no idea at all. Anyway, here's how I looked as I was making these mistakes:



That's from Tonya, whose account of the dinner can be found here. She's got a closeup of the torte and pictures of Jeremy and Nina looking surprised. I forget why. Jeremy has the most dinner coverage, the only real play by play. Good comments section too. Nina, because she did all the cooking--she love to cook! she wanted it this way!--was restricted to after-blogging. And there's another picture of me there too.