Answering Foxfyre's call to speak to the pros and cons of the Republican convention, which I have done and will continue to do:
Pros: The Republican party is unveiling itself.
Cons: What we find beneath the veil is hypocrisy, divisiveness, and hate-mongering.
Here's something that I found interesting. Jesse Ventura was a guest on the Larry King show the night before Palin delivered the party speech of divisiveness and hate. Here is what they stated:
VENTURA: Well, you know, the Republicans have been pushing really Hermann Goering on us, the Nazi, since 2001. I mean, you know...
KING: Hermann Goering?
VENTURA: Yes. He said that it's easy to take a country to war. You have to convince them they're under attack. Denounce the pacifist for being unpatriotic and also for putting the country into danger. And yet, Thomas Jefferson said dissension is the greatest form of patriotism.
I like to follow the teachings of Thomas Jefferson a little bit more than Herman Goering.
KING: D.L., are you...
HUGHLEY: To follow...
KING: I'm sorry. HUGHLEY: To follow up on what Jesse was saying, it did remind me --
I promise you, the first thing I thought when I saw those "Country First" signs, it reminded me of Nazis. It really -- I mean they just seemed so, you know -- that seemed to be a country that I don't recognize.
It seemed to be -- it didn't look that way. It looks very exclusionary. It looked very specific. I didn't see anything that looked -- you know everybody looked like they were -- had the same experience, had the same kind of process.
It seemed like that -- I felt more like I was looking -- I mean, peering into something that wasn't necessarily invited to. So I didn't -- I can't see anybody would watch them and think that those people would be, you know, open to anybody with a different experience.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0809/02/lkl.01.html
It appears that Palin's party handlers and speech writers were paying attention to the comparison of the Republican party to the world's experience with the Nazi propaganda machine. Here's an excerpt from Wiki about a famous Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels:
Speech by Joseph Goebbels on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the so-called "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin:
"Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right.
I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. "
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels
NOW, here's Sarah Palin accusing Obama of being a Nazi-like propagandist with a different message for different crowds:
"I guess -- I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.
"I might add that, in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they're listening and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening.
"No, we tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.
"As for my running mate, you can be certain that wherever he goes and whoever is listening John McCain is the same man."
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ROFL
CON: The Republican convention is demonstrating intellectual dishonesty running amok.
What do I expect to see from McCain's speech tonight? I expect to see exactly what Ventura predicted: McCain will paint a picture of danger to our national security and portray himself as our only possible savior, notwithstanding his poor judgment and hair-trigger temper. Other than playing lip service to the issues that confront working people and their families, he will not tell us in any substantive or meaningful manner what he intends to do, as president, to confront those issues.
As one commentator stated, the wealthiest families of America have had their president for eight years and the policy of trickle-down economics of the past has done nothing for this country. It's time for working people to have their president and for our country to rebuild it's economic policies from the ground up.
