July 20, 2016

Day Three's RNC crowd is the same as Day one and Day two. They have a penchant for blood and are looking to make Hillary Clinton walk the plank.

These Republican delegates chose Donald Trump out of more than a baker's dozen and there's a reason why.

The influence of AM hate talk radio, Fox News, The Blaze and every other well funded conservative media outlet has made rage their number on priority. Keep their people angry and they will make you money.

They have turned many in their electorate into spiteful, hateful and bigoted fools. They know they've been wronged, Obama is a secret Muslim, and brown people are stealing their tax dollars even if personally their lives are fine.

This has been exemplified in the RNC Convention in Cleveland.

Dylan Matthews at Vox wrote a great piece:

But what made Christie’s speech genuinely scary was that it was a distillation of the Republican convention so far, not an aberration from it. Both nights featured the crowd breaking into frequent, raucous chants of, "Lock her up!" Former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn repeatedly stopped his own speech to echo the crowd’s call to imprison Clinton.

Jailing the presumptive Democratic nominee has been the one point of enthusiasm and consensus in a Republican convention that has otherwise been listless and unfocused, with primetime speakers frequently addressing a half-empty arena and party leaders delivering speeches that go out of their way to avoid much mention of their nominee, Donald Trump. Absent the unifying power of proud partisanship, Republicans have turned to a particularly toxic form of negative partisanship, and have come together around not just their hatred of Clinton but their belief that she is a criminal.

And not merely that she is a criminal because of conduct that might run afoul of the law, not merely because the crowd thinks her email handling crosses a line that FBI Director James Comey didn’t think it crossed. They think she deserved to be tried and convicted for pursuing the public policies she believes to be correct.

That is not a healthy attitude for a major political party to embrace. And it’s an actively dangerous case of norm erosion for mature political leaders like Chris Christie to encourage. The jailing of political opponents is something that happens in dictatorships and banana republics. It is not something an advanced democracy can accept as a normal demand.

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