A Parade of Lies, and One Chilling Truth

So much for an upbeat, optimistic convention.

I could only bear to watch some of the cut-rate Triumph of the Will that passed for the 2020 Republican National Convention — maybe a third of it — but I’d be surprised if what I missed redeemed what I saw. Because what I saw was absolutely grotesque.

As Andrew Marantz writes in The New Yorker, “To some extent, all party conventions are pageants of paradox and puffery.” But what we saw this past week went far beyond that. Here’s Dan Rather:

Even to call it a convention is to miss the point. This was propaganda, the pageantry, power, and symbolism of our federal government — OUR government, we the people — exploited by a president who feels unbound by the constitution in his desperate desire to hold on to power.

A secretary of state from foreign soil pledges sycophantic fealty to his boss with hopes of bolstering his own standing in a political party that has become a personality cult. Immigrants are used as props in the White House by a president who has demonized, restricted, and mistreated even legal immigrants and asylum seekers. Uniformed military personnel are employed in this charade. A first lady, who is an unrepentant birther, mouths teleprompter platitudes in front of an unmasked crowd of true believers during a deadly mismanaged pandemic in a…