Tag Archives: DNC

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Get ready for emotions at DNC

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This blog post is aimed at Democratic partisans who are energized by the massive change at the top of the party’s presidential ballot.

I am one of them.

The Democratic National Convention that convenes soon in Chicago is going to contain several emotional moments. One of them is guaranteed to occur the night President Biden speaks to the conventioneers gathered before him.

Someone will introduce “the president of the United States” to the crowd and, you can take this to the bank, they will explode in a torrent of emotion toward the podium. They will be thanking Joe Biden for standing down in the wake of the torrent of criticism he received after that terrible debate performance with Donald Trump.

They will cheer, shouting his name … and it will take them several minutes to collect themselves and listen to whatever the president has to say.

I look forward to watching this display of affection play out. I might even join them from my living room in North Texas.

I know that not every American will rejoice in that moment. There will be ration of MAGA soreheads among us who will find it all disgusting. To them I say: it’s too damn bad.

Joe Biden’s presidency has been a rousing success and he will earn the affection that will shower on him at the Democratic National Convention.

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RNC loses will to fight

It is clear to me that the leadership of a once-great political party has lost its will to stand and fight for what it believes.

The Republican National Committee’s decision to bow out of future presidential debates — at the primary and general-election levels — has demonstrated to me that the party has been taken over by cowards.

Think of it. The titular head of the party, Donald J. Trump, is the former Coward in Chief. He bitched out loud during his term as president that the press is the “enemy of the people.” He yapped and yammered preparing for presidential debates with the fellow who beat him in 2020, Joe Biden, that the joint appearances were stacked against him.

Trump has managed to project his cowardice onto the leadership of the RNC, now led by Ronna Romney McDaniel. Here’s an example of how McDaniel shows her cowardly nature: She used to be proud to wear the name of her uncle, Mitt Romney; these days, because The Donald despises Romney, she has dropped the “Romney” from her name and now goes by Ronna McDaniel. It’s a little thing. Then again, it really isn’t.

Now the RNC has decided that it won’t rely on journalists to moderate future presidential debates. Its decision, therefore, to pull out of future events sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates — a non-partisan group — suggests it has swallowed the swill served by The Donald.

The nation has come to rely on these joint appearances to help voters make decisions on who is best suited to lead the country. And, yes, at times individuals emerge from these events whom no one expects. I am willing to argue that Donald Trump pulled off that very surprise during the 2016 presidential primary season.

So, what happened to The Donald? He lost re-election in 2020 and promptly blamed everyone else for his loss, ignoring the undeniable truth that the presidency he ran failed. He threw blame at the feet of the debate organizers.

Now we have the Republican National Committee continuing to adhere to the whims and machinations of the twice-impeached and defeated POTUS.

Cowards. All of ’em!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

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Hoping to unpack all the lies

This is likely an unreasonable expectation, but I will express it anyway.

It is my hope, at least, that those who want to see Donald Trump defeated for re-election can unpack all the lies he has told during his brief time in politics and expose the man who told them as a fraud who is unfit for the office he occupies.

Take it away, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Trump no doubt will pile a load of more lies onto his huge pile of prevarication tonight when he speaks to the faithful scattered on the White House lawn. The location of his partisan speech, of course, creates a whole other set of ethical — and maybe legal — concerns.

I have chosen to look away from Trump tonight when he accepts the Republican presidential nomination. He lies incessantly and relentlessly. The GOP convention has ignored the multiple crises that are enveloping the nation: the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter rebellion, climate change, the Gulf Coast hurricane.

Trump will tell us it’s all going just swell. It ain’t.

He will lie repeatedly tonight. He will seek to portray Joe Biden as a tool of the far left, which of course is utter nonsense.

I expect there to be some serious examination of the lies Trump has told and will tell again and again. I have no hope of persuading the committed cultists who have bought into the baloney that Trump dispenses.

It’s those undecided voters, or fence-straddlers who need to be persuaded that the nation cannot afford another four years of this individual’s lying.

There is just so much to unpack, to reveal, to expose. Good grief. It might be too much for the voting public to consume.

I do want to see this effort unfold that seeks to reveal finally the fraudulent nature of this man’s political existence.

I turn it over to you, Vice President Biden and Sen. Harris.

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Errors of omission aplenty

Republican National Convention speakers have been criticizing their Democratic convention colleagues for what they have called an egregious error of omission.

Democrats, they say, should have talked about the violence that has erupted in many of our cities as Americans have protested police conduct in the wake of the deaths of African-Americans.

That’s a fair point. The DNC should have spoken to that issue at their virtual convention a week ago.

However, let’s not let the RNC escape similar critiques of its message. The GOP that has nominated Donald Trump and Mike Pence for a second term has yet to address the terrible heartache, misery and death associated with the COVID crisis. Yes, they have acknowledged the existence of the crisis. They have said nothing about how it has affected the loved ones of those who have died or the economic collapse that has occurred as a result of the pandemic.

Therein, I submit, exists the error of omission on the Republicans’ part in this political game of Can You Top This?

Republicans continue to portray Donald Trump’s initial pandemic response as courageous, forceful, bold, proactive … all that happy horse dookey. It was none of that. They know it as well as you and I know it. Do not expect them to come clean by the time the convention wraps up.

I just want Democratic nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to remind voters of the start choice awaiting them. Do they want more of the same chaotic incompetence or a return to compassion, empathy and actual presidential leadership?

You know already where I stand.

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From dark to light

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Joe Biden vows to lead us from the darkness into the light. He says Donald Trump has steered the nation into the proverbial darkness through his incompetence, incoherence and lack of empathy.

Donald Trump says Joe Biden’s policies will result in a loss of guns, God, freedom … and maybe even our very lives.

Who’s version do you prefer? Well, I am all in with Joe Biden. I did manage to watch a lot of this past week’s Democratic National Convention. I could take only one night of the RNC, so my comments about the GOP convention will be based on that first night.

I heard a dark and foreboding tale coming from the likes of Don Jr., his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and assorted other fans/toadies/lackeys of the president, all of whom told bald-faced lies about the character of the individual they are facing in the upcoming presidential election.

They are trying to paint Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris with the far-left progressive/socialist paint brush.

What about them? Let’s see: Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972; he made friends with Republicans and Democrats; he served as chair or ranking member on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees; he crafted legislation that protected women and sought to toughen federal laws against certain crimes. He also endorsed the Defense of Marriage Act, which chaps progressives’ hides. He was in a position to lead efforts to take away our guns, but didn’t do it. Nor did he do anything that diminished the role of religion in people’s lives.

As vice president, he helped craft the Affordable Care Act, he led the fight against the Ebola pandemic and sought greater accountability from government agencies.

Man, that’s scary stuff.

What about Sen. Harris? She was a career prosecutor. She served as California attorney general before being elected to the Senate in 2016. A prosecutor and an AG? Does that speak to a career aimed at disarming Americans or taking God out of our homes?

The RNC no doubt is going to paint Biden and Harris as monstrous cretins. They’re both well-educated, seasoned in the mechanics of government and are battle-tested.

I’ll get to this God matter in a blog post in the near future. For now I want merely to challenge the assertion that Joe Biden is beholden to far-left ideologues. Indeed, for Donald Trump to suggest any sort of fealty to ideology — given his own penchant for tilting toward right-wing TV talking heads — is laughable on its face.

Except that I ain’t laughing. Neither should anyone else.

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Let’s await the ‘phony’ and ‘fraud’

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Mitt Romney told the nation midway through the 2016 presidential campaign all about Donald John Trump.

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee spelled it out in a 17-minute speech. He said Donald Trump is a “phony” and a “fraud.” Yet the 2016 GOP nominee won that year’s presidential election by offering phony promises and running on a fraudulent background.

Trump is going to try to sell a nation once more on the phony, fraudulent past and seek to persuade Americans that what they have seen and heard is part of some mysterious Deep State “fake news” media conspiracy.

The Republican National Convention will unfold Monday in Charlotte, N.C. It will be a virtual event just as the Democratic Convention turned out to be.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden awaits the nomination of Donald Trump, who is going to tell the nation that life is good on his watch, that his administration is conquering the coronavirus pandemic, that the economy is just swell, that the United States enjoys the respect of the rest of the world and that he is protecting our troops who are waging war against international terrorists.

It’ll all be lies. He will lie and lie again and again.

The most astonishing aspect of his lying will be that about 40 percent of voting public will believe every lie he tells.

Donald Trump’s fraudulent term as president has been brought into the sharpest relief possible.

The economic collapse caused by the pandemic has wiped out every bit of job growth we have experienced over the past decade. Our troops face additional threats abroad because of the bounties that Russians are paying to Taliban terrorists for every American they kill on battlefields in Afghanistan. The pandemic itself is continuing to sicken and kill Americans daily. Most of the rest of the industrialized world has contained the virus and world leaders now look at Americans with pity.

Get ready for the convention/clown show that will unfold in Charlotte. I will grit my teeth and recall that Mitt Romney pegged Donald Trump perfectly when he warned us of what we would get were he ever elected president.

If only all of us had paid attention.

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How to watch the RNC?

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It pains me greatly to ask this, but I must.

How in the world am I going to watch the Republican National Convention after having my spirits lifted from the Democratic National Convention?

The RNC is set to nominate the most loathsome individual I have seen in my lifetime to the office of president. They anointed Donald Trump their party’s nominee in 2016 and then he surprised practically every political pundit/analyst/observer on Earth by actually winning the election.

He is likely to deliver the same hideous sort of speech late in the week when he accepts the nomination a second time. The speakers will seek to paint this individual as something he most certainly is not: a statesman, a leader. He is nothing of the sort.

Indeed, when Democratic nominee Joe Biden pledged on Thursday to be a “president for all Americans,” my mind drifted immediately to the horror being brought at this moment to our friends and family members in California. Fires are threatening lives up and down the state.

Where is Donald Trump’s expression of support? When has he said he would devote all federal help possible to assist those Americans? Trump does not see himself, in my view, as their president. He is president only to the base that stands with him and his ghastly pronouncements.

I’ve never had to deal with this immense gulf between candidates of opposing parties competing for the presidency. To be candid, it makes me quite uncomfortable.

In 2008 and again in 2012, I watched the RNC with considerable interest as the GOP nominated, respectively, two fine men with stellar records of public service: the late John McCain and Mitt Romney.

In 2000 and 2004, I was able to watch the RNC nominate George W. Bush.

It is remarkable, indeed, to think that President Bush and Gov. Romney, two of the GOP’s three most recent nominees will not take part in this year’s virtual convention. Sen. McCain, were he around, certainly would want to stay far away from any political event having to do with Donald Trump.

I’ll suck it up and watch at least part of the RNC that’s coming up. However, I might have to clear the room of any objects I could throw at my TV.

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Watched this boy with empathy

I couldn’t help but feel my heart pounding hard as I watched a 13-year-old boy tell the world about the kindness extended to him by Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Brayden Harrington has a stuttering issue he must confront every day. He delivered his remarks with supreme courage during the virtual Democratic Party Convention this week. He got most of his remarks out without a hitch. Not all of it, though.

Biden overcame a stuttering issue as he was coming of age. He would read poetry, forming words carefully to avoid getting caught up in a stutter. I admire his courage, too, in fighting through the debilitating impediment. I also will pray for the future progress of young Brayden as he makes his way through life.

I also would tell him, if given the chance, that he must prepare himself for more of the mistreatment I am certain he has endured already from his peers. I won’t call them his “friends,” because real friends wouldn’t subject him to the bullying and humiliation he likely will experience … and has experienced already.

I know how it goes. I felt it, too. I once had a serious stuttering problem. I cannot say it is totally eradicated. Words still trip me up on rare occasions. As a teenager — indeed, well into my high school years — I struggled with speaking, particularly in front of large groups of people.

Two of my classmates in high school heard me once stumble while trying to say my own last name during a class project. They just split a gut, man! For the rest of my high school years these two fellows would mimic that moment of supreme embarrassment.

Well, that was then. The here and now is quite different. I have conquered that demon … more or less. Oh, those two guys? One of them is now deceased. I saw the other one at my 50-year high school reunion in 2017. We chatted amicably as if nothing ever happened during the bad old days. I hope he reads this blog and recognizes himself in it.

Hey, I don’t hold any hard feelings toward him now. I damn sure did back then.

So, I salute young Brayden Harrington for standing before the entire world and speaking out on behalf of a politician who knows the battle he is enduring.

Could I ever do such a thing when I was 13 years of age?

Not on your life!

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Way to go, Joe

I am joining the chorus of Joe Biden supporters to declare that Thursday night’s presidential nomination acceptance speech, while perhaps not a grand slam home run, could pass as a stand-up triple.

I am giving the Democratic presidential nominee credit for stepping up his game, for offering a glimpse into the future he foresees if he gets elected president and for reminding us — without overdoing the rancor — that Donald Trump has failed in his primary mission as president, which is to protect Americans.

The former vice president had a big hurdle to clear. It was erected the previous night by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and, of course, by former President Barack Obama and their respective speeches to the nation.

Biden cleared the hurdle. I am more than satisfied with how he comported himself and how he delivered an important message to those of us who wanted to hear what the nominee had to say.

My major takeaway? Joe Biden intends to lead us out of the darkness and into the light.

Even on his best days, Donald Trump cannot stop alleging that America has lost its way, that we no longer were great, strong and economically healthy when he took office. Trump has told those myriad lies for too long.

Joe Biden reminded us that the pandemic needed Trump’s attention from the very beginning. As a result of his early denials of the seriousness of the COVID crisis, we have lost too many American lives and seen too many more infected by the killer virus.

Trump and the Republicans get their turn next week. They, too, will conduct a virtual convention, with Trump set to accept his party’s nomination with a speech delivered from the White House.

I’ll state it once more: My mind is made up. There is no way on God’s precious and fragile Earth that Trump will earn my support. However, I intend to watch the Republican show if only to see how they intend to defend the indefensible … which is Donald Trump’s record in the only public office he ever had sought.

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Most important … ever?

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

We hear it every presidential election cycle, about how “this election is the most important in our lifetime … or in the past century … or in the history of our glorious republic.”

Take your pick. It’s one or some or all of them, right?

Well, I happen to think the election we’re about to conduct might qualify as the most important election ever. As in ever in the history of the great nation we love and cherish!

Donald J. Trump became president by trading on voters’ unhappiness with the “status quo,” whatever that meant. What the nation got has been a lesson in chaos, confusion, incompetence, disloyalty and an obsession with hostile dictators at the expense of our national intelligence community.

Who would think they ever would hear a president trash his predecessors’ records in the White House while extolling the “love letters” he receives from a murderous Marxist dictator? Moreover, who would have thought that another dictator would stand accused of paying bounties on the lives of American service personnel and our commander in chief would refuse to punish him; the president has betrayed the oath he took to protect the men and women he sends into battle.

Joseph Biden stands poised — I hope! — to remove Donald Trump from the White House, a place he never should have been allowed to enter, let alone as president of the United States.

I have tried to make a singular point about Donald Trump, which is that this individual’s entire adult life — all of if! — has been focused solely on enriching Trump. Public service has been totally foreign to him. We now are witnessing the consequences of what I have sought to tell readers of this blog. He doesn’t comprehend the public service aspect of his job.

As President Barack Obama noted in his speech Wednesday night, Trump views his office as a “transactional” endeavor, meaning that he would enact public policy in exchange for favorable treatment.

That is not good government. It is not in keeping with public service at any level, let alone at the highest level possible.

Yes, we are faced with a monumental election in just a few weeks. Americans who were fed up with the status quo now have learned what they got. They got a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t care to learn anything about the office he occupies or the limits built into it.

We need to rid ourselves of a president who is endangering the very democratic principles he took an oath to protect.

Is this the most important election we’ll ever decide? It looks like the real thing to me.