Got home late Wednesday and turned on the third night of the Republican Convention coverage. Watching the live feed from C-Span I was struck, as many have already pointed out, by the high production values of the broadcast (that’s a synonym for stagecraft, which in turn is media-speak for the skills and techniques used in the enhancement of motion picture or television productions). For grins and giggles I flipped over to first, MSNBC, then CNN to see what they were saying.
I wanted to throw up. The sniveling, the dismissiveness, the mischaracterizations, the “don’t listen to them, look at this shiny object over here” deception, the projection of everything the Left has been saying and doing onto the RNC speakers…it was infuriating.
Whether or not you thought the administration of the oath of citizenship the night before or the speech given by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from Jerusalem were theater, for the Leftists to cry and gnash their teeth that these were “political stunts” made me yell at the screen, “You are the MASTERS of political stunts…you ought to know!” Please see Exhibits A, B, C and D: the spying on the Trump campaign, the Russia collusion hoax, the pathetic and treasonous impeachment nonsense, and the Kavanaugh character assassination, just to cite a few premier examples of the Left’s political stunt production!
I relished the thought that for once, the GOP had taken the gloves off and started to fight fire with fire. I also thought…”You can dish it out Democrats, but you just can’t take it can you?”
It was as if I was standing on the side of the path leading down to the gates of Hell, watching with revulsion a hydra with all but its last head severed, writhing back and forth as flames surrounded it and it strained against an invisible force pushing it back down into its black hole in the earth. The Left is that hydra, and while it may not be completely dead after November 3rd, it will, I predict, be wringing its claws and licking its wounds for a long time into the future.
I recently had a conversation with a Brit living here in the U.S. who, though a conservative, finds the demagoguery and mud-slinging of the current campaigns detestable, or in her words, “bad form”. “Why”, she asked, “can’t the politicians simply state what they have done or will do, how it will benefit their constituents, and avoid all the trash-talking?” “Why won’t the GOP take the High Road.”
I calmly explained that the Republican Party has been taking the High Road for 40 years plus years. But though using reason, logic, espousing patriotism, traditional values and motivated largely by wanting to do what is right for this country, the GOP has fallen further and further behind the Left in the court of public opinion. The Left’s production values, in recasting their deceit, hypocrisy and antipathy towards the values and principles that made the United States great as something GOOD rather than the evil it actually is, has brainwashed, warped the thinking of and created a false reality that is bought only by the holier-than-thou-the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me-cocktails-in-hand Hollywood, Tech-land and Wall Street elites, the naive snowflakes of Gen Z, the permanently dependent, the self-made losers and victims looking for the next free Obama-phone. In recent years they have numbered just about half of the population, unbelievably. Trump, bull-in-a-china-shop disrupter, New York real-estate thug, street-fighter and counter-puncher, who, like the Democrats, doesn’t care what people think of him personally, was precisely the kind of candidate in 2016 who could take on and defeat the Leftist/Clinton machine.
In 2020, I explained, the Left having had their butts handed to them in 2016 and learned something from it, have pulled out all the stops…in fact, they will stop at NOTHING, to try to avoid their writhing, thrashing, wailing, burning retreat into the black place from which they emanated.
Civility, decorum, good manners, understatement, “rising above it all” be damned. The Right has to fight and if that means descending into the muck with the Left and throwing the BS flag whenever they spout garbage so be it. The future for our kids and grand kids was at stake in 2016. We won that battle, but the stakes are even greater in 2020.
So the answer to the question as to why the GOP can’t take the High Road this time is embodied in the coffee cup quip…
“No more mister nice guy!”
