#also only dandy slander here

[rununcal]

Once again I make up things

Xtra under the cut

This was mostly just a test to see how I could put Dandy's World characters in the style of TV shows from the era the show theoretically aired (1990s and maybe a bit before that). While most characters are inspired off of shows like Dexter's Lab and the Powerpuff Girls, I decided to go a bit more grotesque with Dandy. He's mostly inspired off of Ren and Stimpy.

For the Twisted terminology, here's the legend!

Hemotid: Derived from blood (hemo) and form (tid/oid). Hemotid means a substance that resembles blood. However, here, it means something along the lines of a body made of what resembles blood.

Hyperhemoidiac: Yea I just wanted something that sounded scientific. It means someone with an abnormal amount of what resembles blood. I made it so that this is what toons call other toons infected with the twisted disease before they fully turn, then becoming "hemotids", or just twisteds.

If I don't put my biology knowledge into a piece of media I die sorry

[colin-firth]

Hi Liz! I finally caught up on s3 of sanditon. So much happened!! What are your thoughts on it?

ty for asking!!! lengthy observations here and under the cut

yesss! so my favorite observation someone had (on fb iirc) was that is was kind of a regency "love actually"? so many love stories, big and small, grand and humble. i love that. i think the absolute highlights was the montrose kids (harry + arthur too), georgiana and her mother, lady susan and samuel. tbh i like heybourne, they are cute, but they didn't intrigue me as much as the other couples. i do get chills at both cliffside scenes but the writing on colbourne was somewhat up and down for me. however, rewatching s1, i realize sidney pinged dramatically between extremely angry and being in love. he had great moments, "my truest self," the boat conversation, and really, really bad moments (ep 1 ballroom yelling, i think he yelled at charlotte aggressively in the boarding house where g lives, being a brothel patron [yike]). colbourne had great moments, cliffside confessions, trying to get her back in s2, developing into a more patient father, and bad moments, yelling at her after the garden party, being cold to his child and ward, etc. so i can't be an unalloyed devotee to either leading man. samuel, however, has never done anything wrong in his life ever!!!! that man has humor, wit, education, a career, but knows how to party down and flirt artfully with a high ranking courtier.

other highlights of the season:

miss hankins romcom heroine era is NOW

lady montrose was a FANTASTIC gentrified mrs bennet

the use of "gallows" to convey the risks of same sex love at the time was fantastic, they did not beat us over the head with it like some shows (fucking downton abbey). harry was so wonderful and charming and i was surprised because the preview pictures of the montroses didn't encourage me. i hate when shows introduce new characters but don't integrate them well or support them with good writing, but they were a fantastic contribution to existing characters and plots.

edwarddddd. ok augward is... yike. and him using wentworth's "you pierce my soul" was slightly yike. but jack fox is my legit show crush and i could watch him play anything, but villain-heroine is everything. eloise was INCREDIBLE during the scene where edward broke her heart, what a talent that young woman is!

lady denham romcom era!!! i love mr pryce, i also noted he tried to woo her with buggy rides which i HOPE is a throwback to esther and babbington with carriage rides

tom's trumpesque ruthless developer era was a lot but i know the narrative framework needs a 'villain' in every storyline. my only regret is it wasn't revealed mary was faking her illness to troll tom.

the interior set of g's party was EXQUISITE

some folks on fb wanted lockhart redeemed. hard no for me due to the racism, so i was glad to see him go full villainy, and his entrance was serving cruella (plus the fun little dandy cane was menacing until it was shown he didn't need it by skipping down the steps)

lady susan!!!!!! sophie winkleman being both minor british royalty AND a consummate actress is so charming to me. i was so glad to see that character developed instead of retaining the fairy godmother quality from s1 that didn't really show WHY she was drawn to charlotte.

the end was serving pure sense & sensibility with the confusion over engagements. the s&s ending is one of my faves of all time.

very interesting cinematography this season -- many beautiful shots from the floor up at g entering a room, behind people's heads

i loved to see the tea room feature heavily again, i love a good tea room

the show was kinda bold this season in a few ways: frank portrayal of racist and misogynist tropes of black women as hypersexual, seducing white men etc; the sidney slander during the trial dflkshfh; charlotte kissing colbourne whilst engaged

OTIS HEA. i liked him in s1 and thought they clearly showed his heart was true but behavior foolhardy. the actor looked so young in s1 but hottttt in s3.

so the homages. i was less a fan of the overt line borrowings ("you have bewitched me") and more a fan of storylines being borrowed (colbourne rescuing georgiana a la darcy rescuing lydia). i am not mad about it but it did take me out of the scenes somewhat, although i recognize it was fully intentional and meant to be a valentine to period drama devotess.

i take some issue with edward's storyline in s3 after going SO dark in s2. but i'm willing to have selective memory because i'm the jack fox fan of all time

ok last thing - i bought a sanditon prop from a dealer/collector. he has a whole box of them and i'm gonna help him index them and make sure real fans (instead of resellers) are able to have a chance at getting one. it's a prize ribbon from the sandcastle contest in s1 held by tom (kris marshall). i framed it with my pop's help. :)

ty for asking and sorry for writing so much!

[lordcastaway]

So the thing is — when i posted them on insta i r e a l l y wanted to sign them but i still didn't (no clue why), so now i'm here trying to make up for it. So, some (the best, the realest) of the canningite crew left to right:

Lord Granville and Lord Morley (Borino), the embodiment of the bitchy dandy aristocracy trope. Also the fact that Morley might have been the inspo for Austen's Darcy is hilarious to me.

Johnny Frere (aka the best boy) and Charles Ellis (aka the soft boy), the closest friends of the main bitch, probably.

Carlo Binning (aka Binny the prank victim)&Bagot (aka the scottish one), very gay for each other for no reason.

Stratty Canning (aka the fanboy-cousin) and Huskisson (Husky, aka the long-suffering nanny), the only people with more than one braincell.

John Ward, later Dudley (aka the one with the most mental illnesses) and Bobus Smith (who wasn't even that ugly, why all the slander), who are not as important but still neat.

[good-smp-posts]

This is the worst time to post but here I go anyways

I feel like TRO’s video about dream was stuck in a one year development hell. And also like it skipped a very important drama that TRO was kinda involved into, and that drama makes me feel like TRO had already made up his mind about Dream.

Let me explain…

TRO’s video focuses on the glow squid drama, the speed run drama, touches on the pride month drama, and also focuses on the “change my clothes” lyrics drama. And while it’s fine and dandy it paints a picture of dream that makes him look like somebody who doesn’t change, and what he changes is how fast he falls to his knees for his “stans”

He paints a picture of a hotheaded dude who “lovebombs” his “stans” to keep them in line, who does little to nothing to control them and basically he calls Dream to disengage. Also he seems fed up, he lets his opinion shine through. Even when he’s covering “facts”, he omits all the times Dream has disengaged, he also omits Jawash (hilarious) meltdown, and the fact that the speed run mods were vocal in their distaste for Dream prior to the drama (and how that obviously would make Dream feel alienated from the start).

But what bothers me the most is how he completely omits the John Swan drama (aside from a few images iirc), and this makes me feel like TRO wasn’t sloppy on his research, he went looking for proof of his opinion and found it.

Why is the John Swan drama so important in my opinion? TRO knew and had proof John Swan was lying from the start (or that’s what it seemed). He knew and didn’t say a peep about it publicly, only choosing to reveal it to select friends of his. He let Dream struggle to prove something he couldn’t prove beyond definitive doubt without TRO’s evidence, so he scrambled and made his infamous “Detective Dream” stream.

Dream was lucky that John Swan’s friends had some pride in their work, and that the right people told the right person that actually there was proof beyond a doubt that John Swan was lying. But for all we know TRO (and all the commentary community) wanted to keep this from the public, they knew John did it, they knew Dream looked horrible and didn’t care.

The call Nick had with John Swan was damning, the “if you know, you know” is a classic. We are also lucky Nick decided he would let other people release the call (because he didn’t do it) and finally prove that Dream didn’t go out of his way to slander a small creator.

After all of that, how can we know he is unbiased? He certainly didn’t have a problem not releasing the only proof Dream had of John admitting to doing it (it has never been released!), in my eyes he would let a innocent man be guilty and be smeared all his life. He had the keys to the prison and didn’t do anything about it, the guilty party only got exposed because a chain of very specific events happened

I’m not the best writer so if you want to rewrite this and share it with more people be my guest, i have (a lot of) trouble expressing myself.

Thank you for reading

[dwellordream]

“...Unlike the self-exile of the Byronic hero—the man who fails to live in the everyday world of people—the Silver-Fork dandy is eminently successful as a social animal; he lives and moves as a defining element of what it means to be inside. The dandy, unlike the Romantic antihero, lives to represent, to present; he is a play of surfaces, of image, of an aesthetic subjectivity. In Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828), the title character decides to “set up a character. . . . I thought nothing appeared more likely to be obnoxious to men, and therefore pleasing to women, than an egregious coxcomb: accordingly, I arranged my hair into ringlets, dressed myself with singular plainness and simplicity (a low person, by the by, would have done just the contrary), and, putting on an air of exceeding languor, made my maiden appearance” (25). 

A dandy’s role required, as Domna Stanton points out, the epicure’s “divination of the trivial” (39). Hence the dandy’s only spirituality lies in an ultrarefined relation to the material object, specifically here personal appearance (the cut of his clothes), food, and horses. The character Russelton in Pelham, said to be modeled after Beau Brummell, finds at a young age that he cannot write poetry, so he instead becomes a poet of appearance. “Finding, therefore, that my forte was not in the Pierian line, I redoubled my attention to my dress; I coated and cravatted with all the attention the very inspiration of my rhymes seemed to advise” (73). 

The text to be deciphered is not a bottomless interior, as with the Romantic hero, but rather the most superficial drapery. That most social of acquirements—manners—are also seen as a site of transcendence. “What a rare gift, by and by, is that of manner! how difficult to define— how much more difficult to impart! Better for a man to possess them, than wealth, beauty, or even talent, if it fall short of genius—they will more than supply all” (31). Pelham “almost die[s] with rapture” (49) over a foie gras. Taste takes precedence over emotional experience: a bad dinner is “the most serious calamity . . . for it carries with it no consolation: a buried friend may be replaced—a lost mistress renewed—a slandered character be recovered—even a broken constitution restored; but a dinner, once lost, is irremediable; that day is forever departed; an appetite once thrown away can never, till the cruel prolixity of the gastric agents is over, be regained” (123). 

With a vast emptiness inside him that can never be filled, the Byronic hero is the figure of insatiable hunger. The dandy satisfies himself by filling himself up in a very un-Romantic way: by eating. While Pelham goes into raptures about the culinary arts, he initially casts a satirical eye on romantic passion. He comments on an acquaintance, “I hear he is since married. He did not deserve so heavy a calamity!” (27). Mr. Trebeck in Thomas Henry Lister’s Granby (1826) (an early Silver-Fork with its heels still in the eighteenth-century novel of manners—e.g., Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney) was also modeled after Beau Brummell. Trebeck “wished to astound, even if he did not amuse; and he had rather say a silly thing than a common-place one” (54). 

William Hazlett commented that Brummell’s sayings “were predicated on devaluing the important through ‘utmost nonchalance and indifference’ on the one hand, and on the other, on ‘exaggerating the merest trifles into matters of importance” (quoted in Stanton, 43). The dandy’s unattainability lies not in a deep interior—a blighted spirit—but rather in superficial externalities such as his genius for inimitable style, a brilliant social intercourse so dazzling it can’t be grasped, a performance of personality that is unreadable not because of its obscure hiddenness but rather its over-signification in the realm of the marketplace. It appears sometimes that the dandy’s soul can be located by discovering the name of his tailor, his florist, and his horse dealer. 

Emotions, even subjectivity, take on an inauthenticity and so clearly mirror fashionable desire outside him that the Byronic idea of the utter singularity of the soul is dissolved out into the social world. According to Bulwer-Lytton’s son, he intended Pelham as “a person who took to himself the form and color of the society in which he moved” (quoted in Christensen, 46). The sublimity of the dandy takes on a humorous banality; it is the “heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic” (my emphasis; 42)—the other half of Nietzsche’s words, quoted in the last chapter. Interestingly, the dandy’s influence on the social world was more complicated and far-reaching than as merely the first word of fashion. 

Bulwer-Lytton was obsessed with Byronism and dandyism in his own personality and dress, as well as in his fiction. Yet he often argued vehemently against the Byronic stance; in the beginning of his career he made a call for reform: “The aristocratic gloom, the lordly misanthropy, that Byron represented, have perished amid the action, the vividness, the life of these times” (quoted in Christensen, 7). He even argues that his Pelham “put[s] an end to Byron’s Satanic mania” (quoted in King and Engel, 278). Clearly, his stated project with Pelham is to empty the Byronic hero of his sublime meaning, but this evacuation points again and again to Byronism itself. 

The dandy’s relation to the sublime lies in his opposing it, his consistent gesturing to its outside. Many Silver-Fork heroes define themselves precisely in distinction to the Byronic pose. At the end of Pelham, the title character apologizes for not being Werther-like: “forgive me if I have not wept over a “blighted spirit” . . . and allow that a man who, in these days of alternate Werters [sic] and Worthies, is neither the one nor the other, is, at least, a novelty in print, though, I fear, common enough in life” (230). The depiction of the dandy was a way to domesticate the Byronic figure, to bring him from the outside to the inside; to control him by making the immaterial material. 

However, Moers points to characteristics of the dandy that might begin to explain his appropriation by the romance, and they also provide a key to his eroticism. She discusses the subversive aspects of dandyism—the irony of Brummell’s status as the perfect gentleman. “The dandy,” Moers asserts, “stands on an isolated pedestal of self” (171). Albert Camus felt the dandy stood for the individual in revolt against society: he places himself inside, even as the creator of the inside, yet he uses this inside to foreground his superiority, the elevation that locates him both above and as other. Trebeck in Lister’s Granby expresses the isolation of misanthropy— thus serving to bring the dandy more clearly into the trajectory of the dangerous lover—by his insolent disdain of earnestness, of real work and caring in the world. 

“Gracefully indolent,” he had a “reputation of being able to do a great deal if he would but condescend to set about it” (52). As Caroline, Trebeck’s love interest, thinks to herself, “There was a heartlessness in his character, a spirit of gay misanthropy, a cynical, depreciating view of society, an absence of high-minded generous sentiment, a treacherous versatility, and deep powers of deceit” (77). Trebeck’s brilliance, his superior sparkle, tends to be not of this world; his misanthropy ruins him for feeling deep passion for others, for showing any real concern for a society he rules by its superciliousness. 

His cynical life represents exactly the kind of man who has run through his successes too quickly; like Childe Harold he has “felt the fullness of satiety . . .” (I, 34) and he is “secure in guarded coldness . . . and deem’d his spirit now so firmly fixed” that it is “sheath’d with an invulnerable mind” (3.82–85). While seeming somehow “used up” by depleting the sources and life of the world, Trebeck might also, like the Byronic figure, have an interior void, where the endless riches of life and love he obtains instantly drain away. 

Another particularly Victorian translation of the Romantic dangerous lover with a mix of Byronic sublimity and early nineteenth-century antiheroic epicurism can be found in Disraeli. Disraeli’s Silver-Fork dandy, in Vivian Grey (1826), moves from being a Pelham-like star to a self full of a melancholy sublimity, tempered from the wild passions of Byron and the Gothic and softened from tragedy to a pallid sadness. Vivian Grey exemplifies what could be called a “hinged” sublime. The “hinge” refers to the way the Silver-Fork dandy throws out nonmeaning here and there but will sometimes, suddenly, point to a secret interiority of meaning. 

And this hinge turns on failure; when the brilliantly successful dandy begins to fail, he moves toward sublimity, as well as the kind of Byronism that later dangerous lovers exemplify. Vivian Grey’s astonishingly influential personal charm and his genius for literary quotation and wit bring him, at a young age, to the center of the haute ton. Vivian is a dandy of the intellectual type, as opposed to the picturesque kind: here we can mark the contrast of the hidden soul in its brilliancy and infinity—the intellectual dandy—to the glittery externality of the soul—the apparent or picturesque dandy. 

Vivian, while a dandy, is far more ambitious than the typical picturesque type; he “was a graceful, lively lad, with just enough of dandyism to preserve him from committing gaucheries, and with a devil of a tongue” (17). His constant study is of human nature, how to please and win over others. The intellectual dandy often hides behind his bright, frivolous façade the activity of the researcher who studies both books and the ways of men. Pelham admits that “there has not been a day in which I have spent less than six hours reading and writing” (201). He also often hides the ambitious politician, and, sometimes, the romantic soul which feels deeply. 

As Matthew Whiting Rosa argues, the dandy, as a fashionable fop, needs to be a literary man, yet he has to hide his hours and hours of study. Intellectuality, like every other accomplishment, needs to appear effortless for the illustrious young buck. Hence a secret interior, a Byronic private soul, distinguishes the intellectual dandy, a superior man among men. In his bid for a place in Parliament, Vivian Grey wheedles his way into the good graces of several influential politicians only to find, when his prize seems within reach, his “friends” turning against him for petty and backbiting reasons. 

Forced to fight a duel, he accidentally kills a man whom he deeply esteems. Vivian weeps “as men can weep but once in this world” and flees the country, disaffected with society, bitter with his life and his own false and manipulative ways. “He felt himself a broken-hearted man, and looked for death, whose delay was no blessing” (175). Vivian Gray appears here as a tempered Byronic hero, a softened Manfred. Vivian Grey’s fallenness doesn’t lead him to exile, or to transcendental homelessness and all the world-hating bitterness that a Manfredian Byronic hero would feel. 

Manfred and his ilk become demonic and otherworldly, while Vivian Grey’s torments take him merely into a melancholy darkness. The melancholy sublime, as Weiskel argues, differs from what could be called a powerful, satanic one because, in the latter, the realization of the self’s abyss, of the terror of annihilation and harm, leads to an aggressive identification with what terrorizes, what causes failure. This type of identification brings with it various forms of grandly destructive impulses, to a laying waste on a large scale. Mournful sublimity lacks the grandeur of Manfred and the malevolence of Melmoth or Heathcliff. 

The melancholy sublime comes from another kind of identification with this aggressive instinct, one that causes feelings of defeatist guilt, partially or wholly sublimated, which brings about a gloomy, thoughtful sense of loss. The Romantics’ freedom to delve into transcendence, leading to a positive, Wordsworthian sublime, or a negative Byronic one, shifts here to a wearied worrying, a feeling of agitation and oppression. Vivian Grey finds himself desired by the ton in Europe for very Byronic reasons; he represents now a gloomy mysterious figure. He retains his ability to please fashionables, to be an astute satirical eye on the empty manners of the upper classes. 

A disappointed man, he is not exactly a ruined one. His world is not Byronically blackened; rather, it is painted in subtle tints of blue. Melancholy evacuates the present of immanent meaning, leaving only a pale semblance of life, an empty play of glittering movement. Gently lost, not angry, Vivian Grey falls in love with a woman who might be his salvation, but he is doubly cursed when she dies suddenly of consumption. In the end, Vivian disappears in an apocalyptic storm, not as a part of its own elemental power—as Manfred would feel—but rather as another stroke of bad luck, a closing stroke in a promising life which ends in failure. 

Vivian Grey, unlike Manfred or the Corsair, sees his failure as stemming from a lack within him, a failure to see deeply enough, to understand fully, to make a positive decision at the right time. Hamletlike, Vivian Grey is sad for the whole world; he mourns it, caresses it with his lamentation. Like a young Werther, he falls into the Heiligtum des Schmerzes, the worship of sorrow. In addition to heroes who fail and are overcome by melancholy or a cynical recklessness or weariness, another trait of both the Silver-Fork novel and the contemporary regency romance is the satirizing of certain aspects of the Byronic pose. Byron in some sense preempted such a stance by himself ridiculing the Byronic pose in Don Juan. 

We have already seen some of this deliberate un-Byronizing in Pelham, and its manifestation in the Victorian period takes on a moral taint. Thackeray and Carlyle, representing a Victorian disapproval of the wasteful, selfish, and idle type, famously criticize what they see as the silliness and final immorality of the dandy and the particularly Byronic aspects of the dandy. Rosa argues that Silver-Forks culminate in Vanity Fair (1848). Thackeray here does even more explicitly what many Silver-Forks have already done: criticize the moral vacuity of Regency society and particularly of the Regency dandy. 

Jos Sedley represents the puffed-out, indolent, false self, a heap of clothes who can only repeat again and again a few simple stories about himself that have little basis in fact. His only success lies in his resplendent personal appearance: “A very stout, puffy man, in buckskins and Hessian boots, with several immense neckclothes, that rose almost to his nose, with a red striped waistcoat and an apple-green coat with steel buttons almost as large as crown pieces (it was the morning costume of a dandy or blood of those days)” (29). 

A picturesque dandy, he revels like Pelham in food and drink, yet unlike Pelham he represents merely an empty joke, an attempted gesture at a once successful performance which now only tries to shore up usefulness, waste, the dead end of everyone’s scorn. George Osborne, while something of a dandy, puts on a performance of erotic Byronism. “George had an air at once swaggering and melancholy, languid and fierce. He looked like a man who had passions, secrets, and private harrowing griefs and adventures. His voice was rich and deep. He would say it was a warm evening, or ask his partner to take an ice, with a tone as sad and confidential as if he were breaking her mother’s death to her, or preluding a declaration of love” (202). 

Yet Thackeray’s continual deflation of George as not worthy of Amelia’s love, as a superfluous being whose selfishness wounds others, serves to point to Byronism as merely a gesture, since George is never any of these things; he’s only a selfish cad. But with the true dandy, there always remains some quality about him that can not be fully explicated. Like the dangerous lover, the dandy’s mythic stature, his symbolic stance of always pointing to something larger and indefinable, create a character that is both complete and difficult to permeate. His wholeness of meaning (or meaninglessness) and his success belie dissection, linearity, teleology. 

Moers writes similarly of the mesmerism of the dandy, represented by Beau Brummell. “There remains an indescribable firmness to the Brummell figure, something compounded of assurance, self-sufficiency, misanthropy, nastiness, even cruelty that made him feared in his lifetime and will never be explained away” (38). The “firmness” or complexity of the dandy character frees him to represent a plethora of identity traits, contradictory posturings, and moral messages. His flatness can be spread out to signify almost endlessly, and from this comes the difficulty in describing definitively his relationship to Byronism and the dangerous lover.”

- Deborah Lutz, “The Absurdity of the Sublime: The Regency Dandy and the Malevolent Seducer (1825–1897).” in The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative

[go-redgirl]

Limbaugh: RNC Was About Saving America from a Race War Democrats Actively Trying to Promote

During his nationally syndicated show on Friday, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh discussed the Republican National Convention held earlier in the week and how it compared to the Democratic National Convention in a prerecorded message he made as he recovers from an infection.

Limbaugh gave President Donald Trump and the RNC high marks but said the DNC was being used by Democrats to be divisive.

One of the elements Limbaugh praised about the RNC was the push for inclusiveness, and argued Democrats were promoting racial hostilities.

Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):

LIMBAUGH: We can rest assured that this is the case, having watched it last night. I saw people complaining. The Fox News people were complaining that the speech was too long, 70 minutes. Let me tell you: If anybody has earned the right to take as much time as he wants to explain himself, it’s Donald Trump. The man has been slandered and libeled multiple times a day every day for four years.

He has been unfairly criticized. He’s been lied about. He has been the subject of a search-and-destroy campaign. And this entire week the Republican National Convention has been a focused period of time for Trump and his administration to tell their story, and if it took him 70 minutes last night to do it, fine and dandy. They say, “Well, y’ know, he didn’t see to have a whole lot of energy out there.”

He was not going to win, no matter what he did. If he’d done Trump at a rally, they’d have said he wasn’t presidential. If he had gone out and been really tough and called Biden a bunch of names, they would have said, “He’s not presidential! He’s not taking it seriously.” So last night I thought he was actually really good. The only thing that upset me about it going long was people were falling asleep in the Eastern Time Zone and missing some of it.

I thought it was exactly what was called for. It was calm. It was assuring. And you know something else? Remember the prepublicity on all this. The prepublicity was, “Trump was gonna come out, he was gonna fire on all cylinders, and he was gonna be ripping Biden and Kamala Harris a new one,” and that’s not what we got last night.

We got a guy who was self-assured, who was confident. I couldn’t tell when he was on the prompter and when he wasn’t. He was funny in a deadpan, slow-stated or downplayed kind of way — and he was unthreatening. You know, the prepublicity on this was, “Well, this guy, he’s going to come out firing both barrels! You better be prepared! He’s going to launch everything.” It wasn’t that way at all.

It was calm, it was reasoned — and for those watching Trump to learn a little bit about him, there wasn’t anything about it that was threatening.

Look, folks, I also have some other observations about things that have happened while I’ve been away. I want to take the opportunity here of this occasion just to get some of those thoughts in, in preparation for my return to the Golden EIB Microphone on Monday. I loved Ivanka’s speech last night. One line particularly stood out: “Washington didn’t change my father. My father changed Washington.”

Boy, is that true. It is right-on-the-money true, and it continues to be the case, and it explains why they continue — in the establishment, deep state, whatever — to be so outraged and indignant and irrational. They���re incapable of being rational when Trump is around, precisely because he is changing where they live. He’s changing where they work.

Now, can I remind you of something? And I took a lot of heat for this. I said last week that the Democrat challenge was going to be to find a way to renege on the debates, and everybody — blogosphere, pundits, and people on cable news — said, “Limbaugh is off his rocker! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Of course there’s going to be debates!

“There’s going to be three debates. Biden is assuring everybody there’s going to be debates,” and what happened? Nancy Pelosi … Stop and think of this, folks. Nancy Pelosi comes out and says, “I would not legitimize a conversation with him.” Now, she’s clearly laying the groundwork for Biden not to have to debate, and she wouldn’t have done that without the Biden campaign’s knowledge of it.

The idea she’s out there shooting from the hip? I guess it’s possible because it’s Pelosi. She may be trying to manipulate things because I’ll tell you something else going on out there, folks. You know, internal polls for politicians don’t lie. The polls that they do that they report to you and me — like take your pick of any poll. Those polls, as you well know, are made to shape public opinion, not reflect it.

But internal polls, like the Trump campaign internal polls or the Biden internal polls? They’re not lying to themselves in those polls — and those polls must be bad. I saw a poll, and I can’t remember the name of it right now. Let me find it real quick. (shuffling papers) Black Lives Matter in Wisconsin’s popularity has gone from plus-25 to zero in two months. Oh, yeah. It was a tweet here from noted hate expert Jonathan Chait.

“Democrats need to be extremely concerned about what’s happening in Wisconsin, where support for BLM has gone from +25 to +0 in 2 months.” In Wisconsin! It’s happening all over the place, and by now I’m sure you’ve all heard that CNN anchors are warning, “Oh, we gotta get serious. We got to talk about the rioting. The focus group data looks bad. The polling data looks bad.”

Oh, so now it’s not about saving lives, not about saving property. Now that all this is starting to hurt the Democrats, now they’ve got to start talking about it? But these internal polls must be bad. They don’t lie in these internal polls. Biden … Did you notice yesterday he didn’t just leave the basement; he went up a floor? He went to the living room. He went up to where there’s a fireplace — in August.

Kamala Harris emerged from whatever hovel she was living in to come out and tell a bunch of whoppers about Trump, and I think the fact that these polls — the internal polls in the Biden campaign — are bad can be seen in the Biden campaign’s activity. Here’s a New York Times story: “How Chaos in Kenosha Is Already Swaying Some Voters in Wisconsin,” and there’s a quote from somebody here.

“Ellen Ferwerda, who owns an antique furniture store downtown just blocks from the worst of the destruction that is now closed, said … Democratic leaders seemed hesitant to condemn the mayhem. ‘I think they just don’t know what to say.'” Uh, if you don’t know what to say about rioters, if you don’t know what to say about people that are destroying your town, then it’s obvious you don’t know what to do about it, either.

Bruce Arians, the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. You know, a lot of these players — NFL, NBA, NHL — decided to not practice or cancel a bunch of games because of the shooting in Kenosha, and Bruce Arians, the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, said, “I don’t know that protest is an action. I think each guy has a personal thing.

Already people in the sports media are outraged that he would say this, that “the Boston Tea Party was protest.” No, it was action. It was much more than just marching up and down the street or carrying a bunch of signs or looting and destroying other people’s property. There is a big difference between action and protest. What he was really saying was (summarized):

“Canceling practice — not practicing football one day — is not going to change anything you claim to be in favor of. It’s not going to matter a whit,” and so — he didn’t say this; I will — they’re getting away with engaging in a bunch of symbolism while not having to engage in any genuine substance.

Folks, a couple of other things here that I want to delve into. I actually believe… I saw a little note from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. Actually, there were some major things happening this week that I haven’t heard anybody say. Now, that doesn’t mean nobody has, because I haven’t been able to listen to everything. But I look at the Republican convention.

It’s been the most diverse political convention I’ve ever seen, including Democrat conventions. And as I’ve watched it, it has occurred to me that Trump isn’t just running for reelection. The story that is being told at the Republican National Convention is about saving America. It’s about saving America from a race war that the Democrats are out there actively trying to promote. They’re trying to foment it.

They want this country to be black versus white, immigrant versus native, male versus female. That’s what they want. They want that chaos. They want this constant us-versus-them aspect of daily life. And Trump is making it clear that he’s interested in people who are constructive, productive, generally happy. He’s not interested in parasites, the generally miserable.

He wants everybody to join in this project of making America great again, to restoring America’s greatness where we had contentment and happiness, and people sought happiness. The fact that all of that is controversial still amazes me. But I think it’s an… If you look at the Republican convention, it is astounding, the understory, or some of the themes underneath the surface that are, I think, extremely powerful.

There’s another thing, folks, that is undeniable, and that is the Republican Party is no longer the party of the McCains or the Bushes or the Romneys or take your pick. I mean, or the Koch brothers, all the big donors and so forth. This is clearly a Republican Party now that is Donald Trump’s, and he’s got 92 to 95% Republican loyalty.

It’s one of the most amazing transformations of a political party, and it’s taken place in less than three years. At this convention, George W. Bush was nowhere to be found. None of the old Republican elders. Romney was nowhere to be found. Not that they wanted to be there, but that’s the point. So I just… I think that there is a lot, folks, to be optimistic about, particularly if President Trump wins.

(alarm chime)

Oops! There’s my timer telling me that my time is up, but it’s not up. I gave myself a couple of extra seconds here. It is an opportunity for an upbeat, positive nature among all of us. This week has been very eye-opening for me. It’s been a very bad week, and yet it has ended for me feeling inspired and upbeat and really confident about the future of our country if President Trump is reelected. I believe the opposite is true if he’s not.