You'd have to have spent the last couple of weeks on an island someplace not to have noticed the major party conventions. So, I did.
Until Tuesday, I was on Sand Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore pretending to be a park ranger. As a volunteer lighthouse keeper, I gave tours at the lighthouse and made sure there was enough toilet paper in the outhouses. It was fun, glamorous work. I'll write more about it next week.
But I'm going to have to write the Week in Review without knowing anything about what was going on. In other words, it'll be just like every other week. So, here goes!
I missed the Republican National Convention altogether, but I heard some stuff about it. Basically, the takeaway was that Clint Eastwood talked to a chair, and Paul Ryan made a bunch of stuff up. (Here's a video I saw about the chair thing.)
Did I miss anything else, or does that pretty much sum it up?
My understanding was that Eastwood's chair was thinking: "Did he say six bizarre things or just five? Do I feel lucky tonight? Huh, do I?"
I also heard that Paul Ryan said that President Obama would cut $716 billion from Medicare while his own plan would cut only $716 billion from Medicare, only he didn't mention the second part. Again, please correct me below if I misunderstood.
I did catch some of the Democratic National Convention, particularly Bill Clinton's speech, which I thought was pretty gosh darn good. It was so good that the Republicans switched overnight from praising him to reminding people who Monica Lewinsky was. As far as I can tell, people do remember Monica but don't care.
I also caught the reintroduction of God into the Dem platform. He had been left out by mistake, and the Republicans, who had mentioned Him ten times in their own platform, were saying that He was on their side even though the rest of their platform was wiping out help for the poor and people with challenges while rewarding millionaires with even bigger tax breaks and denying that we were screwing up His planet with climate change gases. The point, apparently, is that God doesn't care about what you actually do, He just likes to hear His name mentioned as often as possible. Once, again, did I miss the point here?
From what I can tell, the pundits are saying that the Dems came out better as nobody talked to a chair or lied too much.
That's all I've got for now. Have a good weekend, kids!
