For the poli-blogs, the Conventions are our Summer Olympics, a four-day excuse to pretend that what we do is important, and thereby obsess over every speech for the four days. In that spirit, I would like to remind everyone that, concerning the event that the blogosphere will be liveblogging over the next two weeks, there is one big difference between, say, the Democratic Convention and the Olympics: people at least give a rat's ass about the Olympics.

Anyone who believes that George Bush won the last two elections because the GOP threw a better, more partisan convention each time is too retarded to be allowed near machinery as sophisticated as a computer. No one is watching that which you care so much about. No one changed their vote from Kerry to Bush in 2004 because of Zell Miller, just as no one jumped on the Kerry bandwagon because they liked Obama's Keynote. As far as the voters are concerned, the only thing that mattered last night was that Ted Kennedy pulled a Lou Gehrig, and that Michelle Obama may not, in fact, be a dragon lady. Beyond that, anything else written about last night is waste of brain activity.