Tribal Hatred And Resentment

From Impression of Wednesday Night's Speakers at the GOP Convention by Chris in DC:

What we saw tonight - with speaker after speaker tasked solely to bare their canine teeth at every "other" they so intensely revile - reveals yet again, in perhaps the most lurid detail yet, that today's Republican Party has absolutely nothing - nothing - to offer but hatred, derision, and a pathological craving for domination.

If this is seriously what our country - still reeling from the self-inflicted wounds of that same poisonous, regressive mentality - again accepts for its future, then this would be perhaps the most profound indictment of our society imaginable.

I was reflecting on Sarah Palin's speech, and the fact that it is being regarded as a display of her "toughness" or some other measure of merit, despite the fact that it was apparently written almost entirely by professional speechwriters and simply read from a teleprompter with trained efficiency. Now, I do realize that many prominent speeches are written by others, but this is certifiably truer of some politicians than of others, and I am speaking here of the most deceptive political scripting.

One of the worst consequences of this now-pervasive, fraudulent manufacturing of political messaging and cultural signaling - redolent of the rank GOP gimmickry that I discussed when Palin was first picked - is that it prevents much of the citizenry from meaningfully evaluating our politicians' intentions, intellect, and actual capacity to govern.

Read more here.