Is it November 5 yet?

I'm sorry, but this, the longest campaign on record, is beginning to lose me. Of course I'll vote, but until then could we please have some conversation about the real problems facing the country, as opposed to mindless shouts of "USA! USA!" Not to mention tiptoeing around the Republicans' VP choice because she is a woman. Any woman who refers to herself as a pit bull should be prepared for newspaper interviews, at the very least.

All week I've taken advantage of HD radio to avoid convention broadcasts. (What - it was on TV too? Amazing.) But last night, returning from choir practice, I flipped on the car radio, just in time to hear JM shouting above the roaring crowd, "Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!" Commentators said other parts of the speech were offered to an audience almost reverently silent, but you cannot prove that by me.

Is this America 2008 or Germany 1933?

Earlier this week NPR flashed back to the 1964 Republican convention, and Barry Goldwater's famous assertion that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice..." Etc.

That summer I worked in SF, for a small film company. Our cadre of free-lance cameramen - all WWII vets, all passionate New Deal Democrats - worked the convention, and their unanimous opinion, after a week of listening to the rhetoric and being pushed around by overly zealous security people, was, "This is America's Munich."