Republican Convention Review: Cruz Booed; Montel Williams Angers Bill O’Reilly
Any regular television viewer who hoped that he or she had seen the last of Ted Cruz’s perennially pious smirk on a home screen had to be dismayed by his image looming into view during the third night of the Republican Convention on Wednesday. But Cruz ended up delivering the drama on an otherwise drowsy night: Declining to endorse Donald Trump, Cruz got heartily booed by great swaths of the arena. As it became clear that Cruz was going to withhold his verbal donation to Donald, the cameras started cutting to Trump family members, who were staring stonily at the stage. In a clever, undercutting move, Trump himself entered the convention during Cruz’s machine-gun-spray attack on everyone including President Obama, “who exports jobs and imports terrorists.” Trump was trying to pull attention away from Cruz, but Cruz’s obstinance overwhelmed the moment; every network reported that Cruz’s wife, Heidi, was escorted from the arena under security guard, so hostile was the reaction to her husband.
Cruz’s non-endorsement woke up a somnambulant convention. The announced theme was “Making America First Again” — it was more like “Making America Sleepy Again.” CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC regularly cut away from various speeches, including those by radio host Laura Ingraham and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Indeed, The Kelly File had even gone to a commercial when Walker delivered his best punchline: He said that Hillary Clinton is such a Washington insider that “if she were any more on the inside, she’d be in jail.” (You know the response; all together now: “Lock her up! Lock her up!” wailed the crowd.)
Other speakers included Donald’s son Eric Trump, whose long list of what his father will accomplish if elected included combating godless liberals who “want the word ‘Christmas’ stripped from public use.” Really: Eric managed to celebrate that old Fox News hobbyhorse, turning it into The War on Christmas in July!
There was also vice presidential candidate Mike Pence (started out humble; stayed onstage way past the 11 p.m. network cutoff point, angering local-affiliate weather forecasters throughout this great land) and Newt Gingrich, who lectured the audience about what Cruz really meant, like a professor who’d come in to substitute for a teacher who had lost control of the class.
Preceding Cruz vs. Trump, the undercard fight of the night was Bill O’Reilly vs. Montel Williams. O’Reilly, who looked as though he’d helicoptered into Cleveland from New York City and left his pilot headphones on, spent the early moments of his edition of The O’Reilly Factor acting as though what was going on onstage was irrelevant. Instead, he cut to Geraldo Rivera, who had ferreted out a flag-burning by, said Rivera, the Revolutionary Communist Party. But O’Reilly gave his audience a moment of sizzling anger when he said to Eric Bolling that Montel Williams had walked away minutes before he was scheduled to appear on The Factor, and that Williams would “never be on this show again … he’s not a man of his word … that is as low as it gets!” O’Reilly gave no explanation of what Williams’s beef with O’Reilly was. On Twitter, Williams wrote, “My understanding of the segment was diff than theirs, it wasn’t resolved, left, Bill fell apart” — but he also did not explain his exit. The whole brouhaha was a puzzler. As Scott Walker said — in a different context, but over and over — America deserves better.
