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Again, Stephen Colbert displays why satire is the perfect lens through which to analyze the Republican Party.  Playing on comparisons of the RNC’s 10 requirements — of which potential candidates must adhere to eight to receive funding — to the Biblical Ten Commandments, Colbert listed some of its strict conservative prescriptions and noted, “They’re just like the 10 Commandments, if one of the tablets said ‘F’ and the other said ‘U.’”

(more below the clip)

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There is one bit of irony I wish Colbert would have touched on.  As I noted recently on Care2, the RNC’s decission to name their test after Ronald Reagan seems curious considering he — nor any other modern president — could have passed.

From the Care2 post:

What struck me most about Bopp’s memo was not its requirements, but its invocation of Reagan.  Employing his name becomes more significant when paired with first item on the purity list:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

That they have chosen to emphasize this economic platform along with its patron saint is certainly no coincidence.  Reagan’s conservative economic prescriptions have been touted as the height of Republican fiscal discipline so frequently that they’ve achieved commandment status within the party.  That this commonly held notion is demonstrably false speaks volumes about what this “purity test” represents… (Read More)

The Obama administration is about to release 244,966 pages of Reagan-era documents that the Bush administration held back for years during a review of whether to assert executive privilege. Historians and advocates of government transparency have complained strongly about the Bush backlog, which Obama ended with an executive order on January 21.

read more | digg story

How the economic crisis can help Obama redefine the Democrats.

From the The New Yorker, 17 November 2008 post by, George Parker:

…Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and immolated itself during the Presidency of George W. Bush…

read more | digg story

Among the top 10: FDR, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. Real Clear Politics post includes fantastic audio & video links & clips from past conventions, some recent, some not so much.

read more | digg story

Also among the top 10 is JFK’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.  RCP sets the scene:

Heading into the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy was a clear frontrunner for the nomination, but did not have it locked up. Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson was at the very least a threat, not to mention the possibility of a surge of support for the party’s nominee in the last two elections, Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy, of course, went on to secure the nomination and gave his acceptance speech on live television from the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.

Perhaps the best part of the post is the AV goodies embedded within its text, and when the link or clip is unavailable it links to the full text of the ranked speeches. However, sometimes reading the text doesn’t provide the flavor of an event as well a video can.

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