The Zell From Hell

The commentary on the Zell Miller "moment" last night as the Republican keynoter is all pretty uniformly negative. As a somewhat objective observer, I turn to Republican Andrew Sullivan, who has been a big supporter of Bush's war-mongering but who has cooled off on El Presidente considerably ever since the anti-gay initiations starting getting cranked up. Here's the Sullivan "take" on Zell:

"Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes. His speech tonight was in this vein, a classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric."

Apparently, it was just too hard to resist putting on this putative "Democrat" in Republican primetime, but someone in that camp has GOT to have enough sense to know that today the Zell performance has become THE emblem of not only this convention but also of their whole hard-right party.