I can't say anything other than thank you for writing this.

This is without doubt the most moving post I have read since coming to TPM and the most chillingly insightful.

Poetic, vivid, sorrowing, angry. I can't praise this piece of writing enough.

Deserves to be on the op-eds of the NYT, WaPo, LAT, etc.

Thank you so much.

TPM STAFF: please see to it that this post gets a wider readership if you can. Thanks.

Thank you.Rec'd

A noble post. The 'Bush Base' is a totally immoral bunch of chest thumping hypocrites who cannot run their own lives in an honorable way but think they have the right to tell everyone else how to live.

They would dance to the falling towers like some cult of witches from ages past, yet not allow cameras at the funerals of troops that Bush sent to needless deaths in a foreign land.

A noble post. The 'Bush Base' is a totally immoral bunch of chest thumping hypocrites who cannot run their own lives in an honorable way but think they have the right to tell everyone else how to live.

They would dance to the falling towers like some cult of witches from ages past, yet not allow cameras at the funerals of troops that Bush sent to needless deaths in a foreign land.

Berry: This, truly, must be the final act of a pitiful, ghoulish people without ideas or a soul

It is most certainly not their final act. Our country becomes more and more full of these vampires every day.

Berry: I do not know if there is a forgiving God, an angry God, or a vacant nothingness between the stars

These are not the only possibilities.

Providing we all put Barack in the White House come November, this may be the last time such a spectacle takes place at a GOP event. All heart and soul hasn't left the conservative movement in this country.

Coke Classic is coming soon to store near you. Sorry for New Coke, but it's one of those things that look great on paper and don't translate to the real world.

Just the idiots who smashed the windows of small business owners at the WTO riots in Seattle don't represent all liberals, this dying ideology is hardly representative of the GOP as a whole, its rank and file members or its history of good works in this country.

Please remember that even as you witness the well-financed and nationally-televised funeral of the coup that took control of this country 40 years ago, that this represents only a very small part of those in this country who identify themselves as conservative. What you are witnessing is the beginning of the end for the neoconservatives.

If you all push too hard on the left, the pendulum will go right past that sweet spot in the center we have been hunting for and which Barack Obama staked his campaign on.

And furthermore, if you want to show that Republicans were dancing over 9/11, give us the tape. Otherwise, objection, hearsay, argumentative, and ultimately without the foundation that such a scurrilous indictment requires. Plenty of shame and disgust to spread around here. This post will stick with me, but not for the reasons described above by the star-struck commenters.

Imagine, Democrats using 9/11 just like the lowest of the Republican scum did for years. Never in my wildest imagination would I have anticpated that.

I won't make any bones about it, my disgust and revulsion toward the GOP (not its ordinary voters) is directly proportional to my love of this country and to its ideals.

I see the modern GOP as a cancer, a leech, a self-serving glorification of the principle of self over community. Where this country could have gone, how high we could have reached by this year 2008 had we not been burdened with their weight for a hundred years...it makes me profoundly angry.

I once was at a hospice where someone I loved died before me, and within twenty minutes of his demise, his children, teenagers, were cutting up in the room where he lay.

When I read the thread topic, it brought forth that memory. The GOP used 911 at the convention. I find that distasteful. As for the dancing, some people are like that. They are not bad people, so Bruce is right there. But I think the post was aimed at the Party's mindset, the leadership, not the people out in Elmville, or Canarsie, or the Bronx. I believe that leadership is duplicitous, cynical, inimical to democratic government, uncaring of the lives of the people, ruthless, unprincipled, and at the minimum, amoral. Jason wants to steer the party back to its progressive phase and more power to him and his fellow-travelers on that road. I hope the "innate goodness" of the American people will aid him in that quest. Some say that the Soviet Union finally fell, first to glastnost then to Yeltsin and his urban insurrection, because after 60 years of state propaganda extolling the highest aspirations, the people eventually came to take the propaganda at face value and to bring an end to the dissonance.

I hope the same thing can happen to the GOP. Perhaps finally at some point in time, the people will take the propaganda at face value and try and bring an end to the dissonance in that party's expressed ideals and its sordid actuality.

Your points about GOP leadership (as opposed to those who vote repub) bear repeating:

"I believe that leadership is duplicitous, cynical, inimical to democratic government, uncaring of the lives of the people, ruthless, unprincipled, and at the minimum, amoral."

Sadly, yes.

Now I rise in defense of Bslev. Not that he needs my help.

If bslev is correct that the intent of the post was to demonize republicans in general then his criticism of the essay would be entirely correct.

Modern conventions are really highly choreographed, scripted affairs, and the participants are well aware of this.

Gone are the out-of-control, 126 ballot conventions of the past with their insurgencies, their wild and unscripted floor demonstrations.

Americans are much more docile nowadays at the conventions. They understand it is an event made for a national tv audience and they try to help the production along.

Lots of audience cues in a convention.

In the RNC convention, the music that followed the video was such a cue. It was as if the convention management/organizers said, "OK, shift mood now, it is good to get out of the sadness and bring back a light spirit to the floor"

And some responded to that cue, knowing exactly that was what was being suggested.

So no cruelty, no harsh indifference to pain. It would have played out the same with the same video and the same music at the DNC.

I would like to draw a comparison between 9/11 and Sarah Palin's Down's baby. When the RNC trots out references to 9/11 the implied message is that the Dems don't care about it. That they somehow are responsible for it in a way that Repubs are not. That could not be less true or more hateful of an unstated message.

Similarly, they have trotted out how wonderful it is that she carried her Down's baby to term rather that terminating the pregnancy. The unstated message here is that a Dem. woman in the same situation would have aborted. That all liberals want to abort defective fetuses and all republicans want to love and cherish them.

When I was pregnant with my son, some of the tests indicated a possibility of Down's. I chose not to have amnio, the most definitive test, because of miscarriage risks. I researched Down's and found that 9 of ten women who find out they are carrying a down's baby choose to abort. I thought this was awful, and sad, because people with Down's can have quite good lives. I knew I wanted my baby no matter what; I also knew that I can't make that choice for other people. I read up on how to care for Down's children just in case. I am a pro-choice liberal and I resent the implication that her personal moral choice proves that I and all other pro-choice dems are immoral. Moreover, I suspect there are plenty of people in that 9 of ten stat who might identify as republicans while keeping their abortion of a down's pregnancy a secret. And that is fine--it's none my business, but it is a stinking hypocrisy that she makes others' choices her business.

I am a patriotic citizen and I likewise resent the implication that because I am a democrat I don't care about 9/11. I know that if I had been at the RNC and seen that footage I would have been upset to the point of tears and nauseated by the juxtaposition with a Top Gun song.

Give me the hokey decorative greek columns over the tawdry abuse of 9/11 twin towers footage any day!

To those voices who have encouraged me and supported my post, thank you; let us work together to fight against this party that can twist any heinous image to its own perverse use, and whose disastrous policies of the last eight years have weakened our country and inspired fear instead of national pride. If you are like me, you are tired of standing idle while the leadership of the Republican Party has systematically corrupted the pillars of its own political philosophy – fiscal restraint, the support of human decency, and good government – and supplanted it with incompetence, secrecy, lies, and…there’s really no other word for it but madness.

To those who have criticized the post, I can only agree with you that I could have drawn a clearer distinction between the unpatriotic and immoral act of disgracing those whose lives were lost on 9/11 by using that day for senseless political advantage and the ghoulish act of dancing immediately after it. If I confused you, I am sorry; I’m only human, and was stunned after seeing such a sad display live on my television. I was also very angry. I am still very angry, because it seemed to me that those people who attended the convention that day were glad for what they had just seen. Jubilant. I have trouble forgiving that.

To those Republicans who are as repulsed by this dance macabre or the political travesty that immediately preceded it as many of us are, I have only two questions I would like you to try answering: how do you forgive them; how do you, after forgiving them, still give them your vote?

Ugh. I'm glad I didn't see that. But thanks for this post, Chris.

I know a lot of decent conservative people who still vote Republican. But it's because their minds hold an outdated image of the Republican Party. No trace of the conservative values once attributed to the Republican Party can be found there any longer. Any real benevolence that may have underpinned that image has disappeared over the years. These folks just haven't realized it yet, I guess.

I have to believe that if they understood what motivates the people who are now in control of the Republican Party -- and this post describes an eloquent revelation of their hideous, craven nature -- they would be as repulsed as we are. God how I wish they could see what a malevolent, deceiving bunch they are!

I have to believe that if they understood what motivates the people who are now in control of the Republican Party -- and this post describes an eloquent revelation of their hideous, craven nature -- they would be as repulsed as we are.

I'm afraid I can't agree with you, Laura. Those people don't need to understand motives. They can witness behavior. If they don't see the repulsive behavior, they are negligent citizens. If they do see it and vote for the corruption that is the current Republican Party anyway, they are complicit.

dancing on democracy's grave

Now there's a slogan!

You know what it reminds me of? The description of the Two Minutes Hate in "Nineteen Eighty Four" and how it ended with a picture of Big Brother which invariably was followed a self-soothing chant of "BB BB BB BB."

Yes, my friends, we are assailed from without by Eurasian hordes and from within by the agents of Goldstein, but our heroic Big Brother will protectively step between us and them, oh, how we adore him.

Chris Berry - I wanted 100 recommends for you! Now it's 101. A lovely number, I think! Possibly a prime number. (I love prime numbers!)

Please continue your wonderful writing! Especially for this election.