Zell-otry
[NOTE: don't forget to check out Ward's Day 3 cartoon in the Village Voice.]

I haven't seen the speech yet, but the commentators are having a field day over Zell Miller's appearance at the Republican convention last night. (Remember: "Give 'Em Hell" Zell nominated Bill Clinton back in 1992 and has been a Democratic Governor of Georgia and, most recently, its Democratic Senator.) This from Salon:

Maybe Zell Miller was just strung too tight following his wild-eyed attack on John Kerry Wednesday night. But following his prime-time convention address, he made the rounds on the cable TV circuit and stole the show -- and not in a good way. Miller's speech was so over-the-top (he essentially questioned Kerry's loyalty to America), it prompted mild-mannered talking head David Gergen to compare Miller to racist demagogue Lester Maddox, while Time's Joe Klein had to pick his jaw up off the ground before he could analyze it.

It gets better...

As Miller steamed, (Chris) Matthews (host of MSNBC's Hardball) asked him if he thought that he was helping the political discourse in the country, and then, whether he even thought he was helping the Republicans by what he was saying. At that point Miller's meltdown peaked. He started waving his arms around, demanding Matthews "shut up" and let him answer the question. Miller then lapsed into a dialogue with himself wondering, "I don't know why I even came on this program," before returning to Matthews and announcing he wished they lived in a previous era because he would have "challenged you to a duel."

Check out Hardball tonight and see if Miller gets invited on (as promised last night by Matthews). But if the NYC Kerry/Edwards fundraiser where Whoopi Goldberg told a bad pun in bad taste (to some) can be called a "hate fest" (as it was characterized by the Republicans), last night should be deemed an "anger fest" with Miller and Vice President Cheney going for the throat.

Miller, said tonight about Democrats and those who criticize the way President Bush has launched and conducted the Iraq war:

While young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.

Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.

In [Democratic leaders'] warped way of thinking, America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself.

Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide.

Joe Klein of Newsweek summarizes thusly:

The whole week was double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly. The tone was set early on ... Allowances should be made for rhetorical excess ... But, even so, the Republican Party reached an unimaginably slouchy, and brazen, and constant, level of mendacity last week ... [President Bush] is in "campaign mode" now, which means mendacity doesn't matter, aggression is all and wall-to-wall ugly is the order of battle for the duration.

And from Pandagon:

I honestly think this is going to help Republicans lose the election. This isn't just negative - this is ass-out mean in a way that a serious political party really can't and shouldn't embrace. It's hard to watch, and I'm jaded past the point of comprehension to Republican nastiness. This is not the way a party appeals to the center - the strategy seems to be little more than getting the base so angry that undecided voters and centrists rush into the party in order to escape the wrath of the rageaholics in Madison Square Garden.

OK, you say, those are voices from the liberal literatti. What of conservative Andrew Sullivan?

Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes. His speech tonight was in this vein, a classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric. As an immigrant to this country and as someone who has been to many Southern states and enjoyed astonishing hospitality and warmth and sophistication, I long dismissed some of the Northern stereotypes about the South. But Miller did his best to revive them. The man's speech was not merely crude; it added whole universes to the word crude.

William Saletan of Slate has a different take about the presentations:

But the important thing isn't the falsity of the charges, which Republicans continue to repeat despite press reports debunking them. The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.

In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.

Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled tonight against Bush's critics.

Are you prepared to become one of those countries?

In a word: No.