Conventional thinking: Perhaps the best word to describe the 2010 Republican Party of Texas Convention, held last weekend at the Dallas Convention Center, is "magical," and not just because of the multitude of sequined, shiny stars and stripes plastered on every available surface—including, blessedly, the seat of at least one Jazzy scooter
No, the magic also came from the unwavering faith of the convention's delegates, thousands of white, middle-class American Christians who know deep down in their hearts that they are profoundly oppressed by these historically powerful interest groups: Mexicans (illegal or otherwise), gays, evolutionists, women, non-Christians, those who do not desire to own guns, and probably a good number of inanimate objects—though at some point Buzz had to stop listening and have a good cry with some day-old cheese cubes in the media room, situated just a scant several thousand yards from the convention floor. As Buzz does. Because Buzz is a whiny-ass feminist bleeding-heart liberal socialist, after all, who has plans to steal away Republicans' free freedoms and give them to some wholly undeserving, baby-slaughtering brown people as soon as we can figure out how to cram them in the back of the Prius. Alongside, of course, the dismantled, mud-covered separation of church and state we picked up after we stumbled over the Texas state pledge for the first of many times at the convention, because now the pledge has God in it, courtesy state Representative Dan Branch, among others, who worked God into the pledge back in 2007.
Oh, but Buzz might even be able to forgive the odder aspects of the RPT Convention—heck, those rhinestone teapot earrings weren't so bad, in a Biloxi-road-trip-Grandma kind of way—if we didn't recall that every salient point about cutting taxes and putting checks on the federal government was made mere feet from a stand selling T-shirts reading "AMERICA'S UNIVERSITIES: THE LAST BASTION OF COMMUNISM." Is there not enough to be scared of these days that we have to extend our fear-mongering into America's proud educational tradition of sending our youth out to four years of drunkenness and taking Psych 101 twice because they signed up for the 8 a.m. section the first time?
But whether it was keynote speaker Michele Bachmann or any number of prayer-and-posturing politicians who spoke throughout the weekend, the main rallying cry was this: No handouts! Which Buzz thought deeply about after the end of a long Friday, when Buzz watched thousands of delegates completely neglect to buy DART tickets before riding the train back to the Hyatt to stand in line for free ice cream.
