Now It's Time To Say Goodnight…

If there is any sort of spectacle more tedious than political conventions, I don't want to know about it. As the Republican National Convention comes to a close for today, you can give them this much: Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman, two pols whose intensity levels jigger from nosferatu to comatose, put together as good a set of speeches as anyone could have wanted.

The shadow hanging over all this is what sort of pitch Sarah Palin will put together, but the RNC is off to a better start (I think) than the DNC was. And because of Summer Storm Gustav, it'll be a day shorter, too, which can only help. I cannot imagine that all the pro-war talk will play well with the American population, which soured on the Iraq War way back when. And while McCain may not represent George W. Bush's third term, he's got nothing going on in his own right. McCain-Feingold? Really awful, still.

The Republicans are in a bad place, deservedly so. They've spent too much, gone to war too much, curtailed liberty too much. It's far from clear that anything they can do in the next couple of days can dig them out of there.