"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Thursday, September 02, 2004 Click to make him kick
Give 'em Zell: The Democratic Senator from Georgia challenges Chris Matthews to a duel on live television after absolutely peeling the bark off John Kerry in a speech to the GOP convention.
As an ancestral Democrat, may I say how thoroughly I enjoyed Zell Miller's stemwinder? Heard it on the car radio, and his Southern cadences, like the call of a baseball game, fit the medium. He was just spitting fire – I can see how political speechifying, back when it was a sport and an art, drew crowds.
Got home in time to see the bantam-like senator, on the air, threaten to biff Chris Matthews.
Oh, and the Red Sox won, too.
That's entertainment.
* * *
Lileks:I’m watching Zell Miller speak, and Holy Crow he is perturbed. The angriest man at the convention turns out to be a Democrat: who'd have thunk. He's brutal. He’s hammering Kerry like a blacksmith; if Kerry was a horseshoe he’d be thinner than aluminum foil. Zell doesn’t gesture, either, which makes him look like someone in handcuffs making a final defiant speech before sentencing. He’s one of a kind, ol’ Zell. Let us not forget that he wanted to provide Beethoven to all Georgia newborns. But an Ode to Joy that speech was not. As an former Democrat myself, I understand exactly the roots of his exasperation. Look, over in Roosia y’all got a hunnert Islamic terrorists holdin’ schoolkids hostage with bomb belts, and they’d do it here in a heartbeat, and they might probably will. So can we talk about spendin’ federal money on carvin’ up embryos later?
Steve H. at the Command Post re Zell: To put it bluntly, he ripped Kerry a new a * * you could drive Michael Moore through, sideways.
Glenn Reynolds:It's funny that the purest voice of Jacksonian America at this Republican convention -- in fact, at either convention -- comes from a Democrat. There was a time when it wouldn't have been surprising at all.
Charles Johnson remarks: Zell will be speaking for me, and for a lot of LGF readers, as a Scoop Jackson/JFK Democrat appalled at the Democratic Party’s lurch to the radical left.
My first reaction to this was to say, "They obviously said that, since Zell is a Democrat, he can go after them with both barrels and a Bowie knife." On reflection, I remember Hill's Celtic Warfare, which used military science to suggest a strong cultural connection between Scottish Highlanders and Appalachian Southerners. This is how he described "the Highland Charge":
'They advance rapidly, discharge their pieces when within musket length of the enemy, and then, throwing them down, draw their sword, and... dart with fury on the enemy through the smoke of their fire... Their attack is so terrible, that the best troops in Europe would with difficulty sustain the first shock of it; and if the hordes of the Highlanders once come in contact with them, their defeat is inevitable.'