Brimstone and fire. The man probably never spoke truer words. You could hear the passion in his voice. His speech was simple and forthright. Whoever wrote it deserves praise, but it was Zell Miller’s plainspoken and blunt delivery that made it dynamic. It makes the tripe Barack Obama put out pale in comparison.
Everything Miller said about Ted Kennedy and John Kerry was true. Here’s the text of the speech. If you go to that thing MSNBC calls a blog, you can access the video of the speech and interview with Chris Matthews.
But Zell Miller was preaching to a choir of people who adore George Bush. He was talking about a man, John Kerry, whose followers would vote for him even if he’d airplane-bombed the Twin Towers himself.
Men like Miller are a dying breed. Men like Kerry will continue to proliferate. Miller is an old-school politician. All that’s left of the party are a bunch of leftist socialists and Marxists, so it follows that liberals hated the speech. Miller spoke about God, honor and duty, things liberals don’t like to talk about.
The media are already trying to dig up “dirt” on Miller: his speech from the 1992 Democratic National Convention. They want to prove he’s a hypocrite, whether he said the same thing about George Bush’s father as he said about John Kerry. Of course it doesn’t matter if he did. In twelve years, a person can have a change of heart about a lot of things. But in their desperation to unseat Bush, liberals would make “news” out of mush. Silly rabbits.
This is how a liberal “reporter” at the Denver Post saw it:
After warning Democrats for years not to go negative or appear pessimistic, for fear of turning off voters, the Republican convention last night adopted the furious face of lapsed Democrat Zell Miller.Miller, a retiring Georgia senator switching his loyalty to President Bush, fairly spewed into the teleprompters. Newspaper accounts and radio clips will not capture Miller’s dyspeptic prime-time moment. In Miller’s view, all Democrats in war time are traitorous merely for retaining their party’s capital “D.”…
Perhaps Miller’s rant was designed to make Cheney, the Wyoming Republican many Democrats love to hate, look more reasonable. Compared with the Georgian, Cheney’s presentation was almost avuncular.
And this is one of the worst, most obviously leftist columns I’ve ever read:
A day after Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., unleashed a bitter attack on his own party and Sen. John Kerry, Democrats returned the fire Thursday, calling him an “angry, bitter, old” turncoat looking to sell books.“Zell Miller is a self-aggrandizing old curmudgeon who is more interested in puffing up his own ego than in providing leadership on the issues families care about,” said Anne Lewis, deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee…
Scowling angrily throughout his speech, Miller claimed that the Democratic Party believes “America is the problem, not the solution.”
Notice something very important about liberal commentary on Miller’s speech. Not one seems to challenge any of his statements. Most contain references to his “scowl,” his age and the fact that he’s a southerner. Liberals distain plainspoken older men from the south, I guess.
OK, so we all liked his speech. We’ll talk about the tragedy in Russia another time. What’s next? He didn’t say anything we didn’t already know. Part of the pleasure we derived from it was the fact that he’s a Democrat speaking out against his party.
Fiery speeches aside, what is Bush going to do about Iraq? Illegal immigration? What did he say, and did it satisfy me? Stay tuned for my commentary on the president’s speech.
