Sneering Cops and Sleepy Delegates In St. Paul

ST. PAUL, Minnesota -- It is finished. The satellite trucks and diabetic delegates and thousands of seething federal cops have gone back home, deep beneath the earth. I'm already home, too, but there aren't too many opportunities to use the "ST. PAUL" dateline, so I will once again violate every basic AP rule of journamalism.

That's all the Main Stream Media does, after all: lie, lie, lie. Check the comments at the bottom of this page for proof!

The Republican convention was a neat, quaint operation. Nobody expected anything flashy or fun or interesting, and nobody expected any answer to America's economic and military collapse beyond an oft-told 40-year-old shaggy dog tale of an old man who crashed a plane into the village he was bombing, back when he was young, and his brave story of personal redemption as his father continued mercilessly killing the Vietnamese children for another five-and-a-half years.

Oh, and there was a hurricane Monday, down on America's Gulf Coast. So the first night of RNC 2008 was pretty much canceled, with a half-empty Xcel Center quiet enough for a nap.

That was how it was every other night, too, with the lone exception of Alaskan anger-bear Sarah Palin's sneering rendition of a Bush Administration speech originally written for somebody like Mitt Romney to recite. The delegates in their comical hats and XXL t-shirts went nuts for that stuff. After all, it's not often you get to hear some right-wing nutcase rant about the losers in the ghetto. Oh, wait ...

Then it was back to sleepy time. The action, such as it was, happened just before the convention began, when the cops swarmed some crusty houses where the protesters were encamped. The usual kabuki theater of kids and old leftists showing up at a convention for the express purpose of being arrested and then complaining about the savage pig police state got a new wrinkle this year, when the feds threw felony terrorism charges at a handful of college kids.

St. Paul itself remained St. Paul, old and oblivious.

"At some point during the convention, Norm Coleman was talking about his many achievments as mayor of St. Paul," Minneapolis native and Gawker editor Alex Pareene wrote me today. "Those achievements were building the cursed Xcel Center and also closing 'all the sex shops downtown.' But he neglected to replace the sex shops with anything else. Downtown St Paul is the most boring place on Earth and it is only fitting that the GOP settled there. Maybe."

But it was friendly enough -- as long as you had the proper RNC bar-coded magnetic-stripe RFID credentials hanging from your neck and didn't look like a dirty hippie. Not as friendly as Denver, where the restaurants were much better and the people prettier and everyone but the cops seeming sincerely happy that you were exploring their weird town on the Rocky Mountain Flats, but good enough for the unloved second half of the Twin Cities.

Ken Layne is the editor of Wonkette, and is finally home in the dry, clean desert after 15 soul-crushing days covering the Democratic and Republican national conventions.