That was quite a convention, am I right? I’m just listening to what seems like the closing strains of Trump’s acceptance speech, a veritable greatest hits reel of the more boring parts of his stump speeches. A lot more waving the bloody shirt, a full-throated exhortation of the new nativism, and a bizarre admixture of vague populist economic rhetoric (that is probably scaring the hell out of some in his own party) and core GOP positions on fossil fuels, school choice, military spending, etc. Over an hour at the podium and still going. Holy shit.

I can’t believe how badly they miffed that introductory video, though. An amazingly bad production, narrated by an ossified Jon Voight (last seen praising Giuliani), it seemed like a farce fit for John Oliver’s show. I had to shake my head a few times – it was a jaw-droppingly lame attempt to make Trump’s life resemble a Horatio Alger story, evidently written by someone in his inner circle, perhaps a family member. He really has to widen that circle.

Okay, so … the convention can be boiled down to a handful of items. One is that Hillary put the nation in peril with her email server. (No, seriously. Priebus said this on the last night.) The second is that Hillary killed those guys in Benghazi, just like Vince Foster. Third, Hillary and Obama gave $200 billion of “our money” to Iran as part of the nuclear pact (incidentally, no one in the corporate media to my knowledge has called bullshit on this yet – the money is not from the United States; it is Iranian assets from oil exports that were frozen as part of the ongoing sanction regime).

But I think what the whole grisly spectacle boils down to is what Trump outlined in his closing argument: we are in a firestorm of crime and terrorism, and it’s all because of them foreigners and their enablers in our political class. To hear Trump say it, you would think that criminal illegal aliens are all around us, striking at will, raping our grandmothers, etc. This is a toxic, xenophobic trope that has already done tremendous damage, from Latino and Muslim kids being harassed at school to thug-like attacks on adults of the Wrong Color. No one in the corporate media is calling this out, as far as I can see. The other side of the deadly coin is total denial on climate change. Trump is the king of drill, baby, drill. If he wins this fall, it’s game over for the climate, friends.

With respect to this election, we have to do the hard thing: convince as many people as we can to vote for the ass so that we can defeat the fucker. This is a test, friends – an intelligence test, to some degree – and we dare not fail.

luv u,

jp