In the lead-up to this week's Republican Convention in Cleveland, everyone who dislikes Trump was looking forward to a popcorn-fueled comedy show. What we've seen is worse - and darker - than what we could have imagined. It started the first evening and transitioned into the surreal for the 2nd day.

A first clue would be the first speaker after the Pledge, National Anthem, and Invocation - the Duck Dynasty guy. He was followed by has-been celebrities, war widows, and ex-servicemen. The theme of the night was "Make America Safe Again", which means it was mostly a lot of noise about BENGHAZI!! and criticizing Secretary Clinton. The middle portion was an uncomfortable stretch of war porn, as they trotted out a despondent mother of a dead Benghazi employee, and then two guys trading stories about killing people and limbs being blown off. It went on and on and on, until every ammosexual had a boner and all the old women were in tears.

Tuesday became a literal shit show, as several attendees came down with the highly contagious norovirus (symptoms include explosive diarrhea and vomiting). It was also revealed that the previous night's speech by Melania Trump was heavily plagiarized from a speech by then Dem candidate's wife Michelle Obama.



This resulted in loads of hilarity all over the interwebs, which is slightly disconcerting as the 2 Hour Hate that preceded it was largely ignored. The Trump campaign added more shit to the pile by coming up with excuses, blaming Obama, and then claiming it was irrelevant. That's the kind of leadership you can expect from this crowd.

Also ignored were some of the "hijinx" occurring because of roll calls and rules votes. Utah tried to vote on rules changes and were denied. This led to some Utah delegates being threatened and harassed by Trump supporters. We've been saying for months that Trump supporters seem to be Brownshirts in the making, and it seems to be the case. It's not just blacks, Muslims, or Dems that they will beat down to get their way. They ended up casting ALL of their delegates for Ted Cruz, and the RNC gave them all to Trump anyway.

Last night, Alaska was the fly in the ointment. First off, they complained that they were denied their roll call vote. Then after all the delegates were counted, Speaker Paul Ryan was about to announce the results of the delegate count, and asked if any state delegation wanted to change their vote. Alaska spoke up and complained that their delegates were miscounted. This led to a lot of shuffling of papers, and away-from-the-mic discussions, and the entire schedule of speakers for the night was thrown off.

And then there was this:



Ultimately, Trump and Pence were officially selected as the ticket, so from here on out, the clown car is burping and farting it's way to the finish line in November.