I Was Told We'd Be Seeing a Nuremberg Rally, and All I Got Was a Lackluster Don Rickles Vegas Lounge Act Circa 1963

 Last Night’s Rally, From Afar.

So the event was pretty anodyne. What was most jarring to me was the pacifist tone taken by some speakers. Joe Biden was denounced as a warmonger. But to be a warmonger, don’t you have to start at least one war? Biden is a terrible commander in chief, as manifested in his withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he didn’t display there the instincts of a warmonger. The opposite, if anything. And it may be reasonable to blame Biden, in part, for the wars that have broken out in Ukraine and Israel, but that is on account of weakness, not militarism.

Worse, in my view, were the denunciations of Dick Cheney and, implicitly, George W. Bush. The days when Republicans stood for a vigorous national defense are apparently gone. When Lutnick shouted “Crush the jihad!” it was a jarring echo of a vanished era. And more than one speaker criticized our support for both Ukraine and Israel from what can only be described as an isolationist perspective.

So last night’s successful, if rather tame, rally leaves the Democrats as the only party to hold a Nazi-themed event in recent years.

As for the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, we missed him, so I watched his bit on YouTube this morning. He was mildly amusing and inoffensive for the most part, but he made jokes about Puerto Ricans and others that were arguably racist. They were the kind of joke that comedians like Don Rickles told in the 1960s. But the Democrats have seized on Hinchcliffe’s appearance and made it the only “news” story to emerge from the rally.

Which makes one wonder: why did the Trump campaign think it was a good idea to put Hinchcliffe on stage? I’m told that his material last night was relatively mild; frequently, he is more controversial. The Trump team knew that the Democrats had gone all-in on characterizing last night’s event as a neo-Nazi rally. Trump’s speech made that charge look silly, but his campaign allowed the Democrats to claim vindication by needlessly featuring Hinchcliffe.