Triumph the Insult Dog shooed by Dems

They give shabbily-buffoonish demagogue Michael Moore a seat in the Presidential Box and newly-spiffed-up demagogue Al Sharpton a speech in prime time – but they give Triumph the Insult Dog the gate. No Speaking Truth to Power allowed for cigar-chomping puppet curs, apparently.

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"Party refuses to cede the religious vote," reads the headline on this Globe piece. The accompanying image: a Muslim woman in a head scarf. A telling portrayal of the Dems' religious appeal?

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Giving tonight's benediction at John Kerry's invitation is the pastor from the Paulist Center.

The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last paid a visit to Sen. Kerry's "preferred place of worship…where people who hate the Church go to church."

There are no kneelers in the church and the atmosphere is decidedly casual. (Of the hundred or so people at Mass on Sunday morning, only two men wore coat and tie.) At times the Mass departs from the Catholic text. During the Nicene Creed, for example, the sections on believing in only "one Lord" ("We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God . . .") and only "one holy Catholic and apostolic Church" are excised from the prayer.

On the back of the Sunday bulletin, the Paulist Center carries ads, like all Catholic churches do. Where most Churches have ads from local florists, funeral homes, hotels, and restaurants, the Paulist Center carries ads for the Animal Rescue League and "Yoga of the Future." The biggest block of ads is from psychotherapists. More than a fifth of the ads in the Paulist Center bulletin are from "Jungian psychoanalysts" who offer counseling, "body psychotherapy," and even "dream interpretation."

THE JUNGIAN PSYCHOTHERAPISTS may be fishing in the right pond…

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How breathless is the celeb-sighting coverage? People are sending in snaps of themselves with Janet Reno.

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Eh-oh! (Via Power Line)

John Kerry: More French-Austrian-Jewish-Yankee than Yale?

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Andrew Sullivan at TNR fisks La Fuzzy Wuzzy, who local radio commentators say appeared the other night to be on some kind of medication:

She is called "opinionated" because she is, and because she is an unelected private citizen who believes that her marriage entitles her to lecture the rest of us. Why else, after all, is she at the convention? She is there as a spouse. Period. In that sense, she is not advancing feminism. She is helping to hold it back. And then, for good measure, she addresses the applauding crowd and says, "Merci." Why? Are they French? Or is she just off on some Francophile digression? Who knows? Whatever the explanation, she comes across as ever-so-slightly nutty.

Okay, she's quadrilingual. But can she skin a deer carcass?

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Pardon me while I fwow up.

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TNR's Michael Crowley watches the Edwards speech from a Boston bar:

Edwards's speech met with a rather blunter response from a local in a Red Sox jersey at the end of the bar. Half-drunk and furious that the Democratic convention caused trash barrels to be removed from around the city, he repeatedly shouted at the television, "I want my trash cans back! Give me my trash cans back!" (Later he added a more high-minded twist: "And free health care!") Then he began demanding to watch SportsCenter, because "there's a pennant race going on." After several exceedingly pleasant days in Boston, I was reminded why I'd so gladly moved away from it a few years ago.

After the Sox fan left, however, the bartender offered a more sympathetic version of the same grievance. "People here are really bitter about this thing," he said, gesturing to the FleetCenter footage on the television. "The street"--Newbury street, in the heart of a key shopping and dining district"--"has been really dead. And our taxes are paying for all this stuff." Hardly John Edwards's fault, of course. But from where I sat, none of the karma around his speech was particularly good.