Whither the Democrats? Watching President Obama’s Wednesday night speech, Jamelle Bouie saw the party pitching itself as the party of decency and common sense—the new representatives of the “silent majority.” Will Saletan diagnoses a turn to the center-right at the DNC, as speakers have appealed to traditional Republican values in a bid to “court GOP defectors.” And Reihan Salam looks at Michael Bloomberg’s Wednesday night endorsement of Hillary Clinton, finding that the Democrats are increasingly the party of the wealthy.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed journalist Glenn Greenwald, who isn’t happy with the way the media has been dealing with Donald Trump’s Russian connection. (Sidebar: Was the “hack Hillary” invitation a joke after all? This is convincing.)
“The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president,” Greenwald told Chotiner.
I don’t have an actual problem with that because I share the premises on which it is based about why he poses such extreme dangers. But that doesn’t mean that as a journalist, or even just as a citizen, that I am willing to go along with any claim, no matter how fact-free, no matter how irrational, no matter how dangerous it could be, in order to bring Trump down.
How are we feeling, the week of the nomination of the first female presidential candidate to run on a major party’s ticket? Well. It’s complicated. (Maybe not for Rachael Larimore, but for everyone else.)
And I wrote about Bill O’Reilly’s comments about the slaves who built the White House, and why arguments over the material conditions of enslaved laborers will always, always, always miss the point.
For fun: The best dad jokes Twitter had to offer during Tim Kaine’s speech on Wednesday.
Leave the nachos on the ping-pong table,
Rebecca
