Two Exceptionally Ugly Incidents in Tampa You Might Not Have Heard About

Well, the Republican convention limps to a close.  Amid all of the stories, there are two that most of the press seems to be downplaying, even ignoring.

They weren’t necessarily big stories.  The first one was rather a behind the scenes thing.  Two convention attendees were throwing peanuts at a CNN camera woman (who is black) and saying “This is how we feed the animals.”  CNN has confirmed the incident, but they’re not offering a lot of details.  The Republican party, in a rare moment of embarrassment, if not actual decency, expelled the two delegates immediately.

She knew it was about her

Even giving them more than a reasonable benefit of the doubt, that they were taunting her as a member of the press and not as a member of a minority group, it’s still pretty horrible.  These are the kind of people who treat cab drivers, waitresses and flight attendants with disdain.  They have contempt for the working man.  And so I’m not surprised.

To give the press a little bit more credit than they deserve, maybe the reason this story doesn’t have legs is because there’s no actual video of it.  Not so much with this second little foofaraw.  A Republican official from Puerto Rico, a woman named Zori Fonalledas, was approaching the podium to speak.  The crowd erupted into hostile, fierce shouts of “USA! USA!”  Rience Priebus had to calm the crowd down and get them to show proper respect for the speaker from that not at all foreign island.

Now they are trying to say that the whole thing is a misunderstanding, that the crowd was responding to a protest by the Ron Paul gang over delegate seating and some people were chanting “Seat them now” and some people were chanting “Kick them out” but neither of those sound like “USA!,” and “USA!” is what I heard.

The Daily Kos is actually buying their story, but I’m not.   Rience Priebus had no confusion as to what it was all about.

But it’s more visceral than that.  Watch them as they chant “USA! USA!”  There is rage contorting their fat piggy faces.  There is hate in their small piggy eyes.