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Every four years a conclave of the most fiendish villains found this side of San Francisco gathers to anoint a reactionary running dog capitalist candidate on a platform of destroying the environment, restoring slavery and making everyone eat broccoli. It is your job as a dedicated progressive reporter to penetrate their lair wearing the token press badges of your profession and file a balanced report describing in detail what absolutely awful human beings Republicans are.
Covering a Republican National Convention is not for the faint of heart. It requires journalistic integrity, keen reporting skills and a willingness to make up racist incidents that didn’t happen to your knowledge but probably did happen somewhere at the convention while you weren’t looking, because everyone knows that all Republicans are racist. Especially the black ones.
Start by observing the reactionary creatures in their native habitat. Emphasize how white they are and mention their lack of diversity in every paragraph. Racism didn’t matter nearly as much before Obama, but these days racism is the only game in town. Even you have to admit that Obama isn’t offering much and if you can’t convince people to feel good about voting for him, maybe you can still convince them to feel bad for not voting for him.
The most important thing to remember about the convention is that it’s racist; so wholly racist that it might as well come with a Klan hood as its gift bag. Think of racism as Waldo: it’s lurking everywhere and only your keen journalistic instincts and a copy of something by Alice Walker from the airport gift shop can help you sniff it out.
Can you see any black waiters around? Are there no black waiters at all or is the number of black waiters out of proportion, in your uninformed but passionate opinion, to the number of black people in the Tampa area? Any of these is conclusive evidence of racism. Find a waiter who has a college degree and hasn’t been able to get a job in his chosen field of ethnocentric history. Get his thoughts on Republican racism. If you can’t find one, make him up. You’ve seen plenty of black people in movies. How hard can it be?
Study all the food on the trays and compare it unfavorably with your experience feeding an African village with the Peace Corps. Speculate that under Republicans most Americans will be divided between gun-wielding Republican warlords hoarding trays of canapés and the starving masses yearning for canapés, civil rights and schools that offer free sex-change operations to teachers as part of their union health plans.
To undertake this journalistic effort you need not have ever been in the Peace Corps or be able to find Africa on a map. Just think about the time that the dentist told you that you couldn’t eat for an hour and how hungry you felt walking past that bakery that makes artisanal organic arugula rolls and how you were sure that your dentist was a right-winger because only a Republican could be so oblivious to the needs and wants of another human being.
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