Roll call

Republicans are not as boring as decent smart guys like Tim Kaine, so I'm sure I would have watched more of their convention were I at home. From what I can tell, however, just noticing who speaks, and who didn't even attend, is redolent of rot. There are two living former presidents of the Republican party--Bush & Bush; neither spoke, neither even attended. John Kasich, the Republican governor of the host state, did not attend. The party's most recent presidential standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, did not attend. The second-place finisher in the nominating contest did speak and pointedly did not endorse the nominee. Who did speak for Trump? A former underwear model who more recently attained semi-stardom as an actor on a daytime soap. Along the same line, there was another actor, this one from a 1980s sitcom, who seems to have been recommended by a recent tweet in which he applied the c-word to Hillary Clinton. There was an avocado farmer and the guy from "Duck Dynasty." Rudy Giuliani, his veins popping out, and Ben Carson, rambling on about how Hillary is "Lucifer"--the show wasn't too crazy for them, nor for Chris Christie, who by now must have performed enough errands to be named attorney general. Just about everyone in the Trump family took a turn; unlike, say, Kasich, they presumably could not say No--or, apparently, overcome the temptation to crib the words of Michelle Obama, who according to the underwear model is married to a Muslim fifth column working to take down our country from of all places the Oval Office. "I feel it in my heart," he explained to an interviewer who asked for evidence. Oh, I am forgetting the woman whose son was killed at Benghazi; the idea there seems to have been that you can't say a grieving mother is nuts. Okay, but what's Fill-in-the-Blank's excuse? The Republican Speaker of the House took a turn at the lectern and described the divisions in the party as "signs of life," but I think the only good sign for the GOP is that quite a few of its current and former leaders had the good sense to stay away.