For What It's Worth: Nominating Comrade Trump

Apparently somebody in the process of nominating Trump quoted the first two lines of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth."  Even more surprisingly, he attributed it to Buffalo Springfield.  But still.  Wow.

There's something happening here and what it is may be all too clear.  The Cleveland Festival of Fear and Hate finished its second theme day; the first day was Fear, Tuesday was Hate.

It's not getting particularly good ratings, though.  Speaking of ratings, apparently the House of Ailes is falling over at Faux News.  Richard Wolffe in a piece called Roger Ailes built the Republican party – now both are crumbling in plain sight
 : "Ailes has lost control of the empire he built at the same moment he lost control of the party he in effect controlled."

As epic as that might be, the story of the day you really couldn't make up: In her speech at the RNC on Monday night, the wife of the nominee--he's the guy who demonizes President Obama at every turn--was caught plagiarizing an entire sequence from Michelle Obama's speech about her husband at the DNC convention in 2008 that nominated him.

The major media highlighted the robbery with side by side transcript quotes, audio and video mashups, while quaintly referring to "apparent" plagiarism.  What was especially interesting for a party and especially this group of people, who had so far shown a complete disdain for the concept of a "fact," is that they were faced with evidence in sight and sound that anybody could understand, and no one could contradict.  And yet, they did.  Or tried to.

Among the speakers on Tuesday was Chris Christie, who decided to organize the festival's favorite chant "lock her up" into a prosecutorial speech with the audience as lynch mob jury.  Not exactly reassuring in a potential Attorney General.  But I don't take that AG talk seriously.  I have to believe that the only way Trump is keeping Christie on board is that he's promised him a spot in the White House itself, where the power is, as chief of staff or some high position--so that when Trump gets bored with the job, as he will on Day Two,  Christie can wield the power.

Big Brother is watching you, and you're unbelievable.

Meanwhile the evidence of connections between Putin and Trump continues to build, including the role that Trump's current campaign manager (Paul Manafort) played in Russian politics, serving Putin.

These ties suggest more than a metaphorical relationship to authoritarian rule.  They suggest a dictatorial Trump in league with dictator Putin.  The GOP just nominated the Manchurian Candidate, Comrade Trump.

These ties suggested something specific to one of Andrew Sullivan's readers on his liveblog of the festival:

"Every time I hear “lock her up” at the convention, I just cringe.  When I think about Paul Manafort’s effort to help elect the pro-Putin Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, and they yelled “lock her up” in Ukraine, that’s exactly what they did. On trumped up political charges (ironically because she accepted, under duress, an unfair natural gas deal), Yanukovych threw former prime minister and his 2010 opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, in prison."

But temporarily free Hillary Clinton is set to announce her v.p. choice this weekend.  Signals coming out of her camp are all but announcing that it's going to be Tim Kaine.  Hillary told Charlie Rose her first priority is someone with the experience to take over as Pres, and she stressed to others that she's looking for foreign policy experience.  The only person on the leaked short list that fits this description is Kaine, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee.