Calling Ethel Merman!

The GOP convention is underway and C-SPAN has all the action, including an incredibly gayish (not that there's anything wrong with that, unless you want to get married) Broadway show tune medley that is exactly the sort of ambisexual spectacle that the Pat Buchanans decried as cross-dressing and the Newt Gingrichs of the party decried back in the early '90s as "Woody Allen" values.

As we await the appearance of the inevitably-described-as-intense actor Ron Silver (you loved him as Gary, the leering neighbor on TV's Rhoda; you liked him less as Alan Dershowitz in Reversal of Fortune), it's clear that this isn't the GOP circa 1992.

That will only become clearer by the time on the last day of the confab when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hit the stage in full drag to do a number from La Cage Aux Folles.