Sen. Bernie Sanders will deliver the most important speech of his life on this opening night of the Democratic Convention. But more importantly, his prime time speech could prove to be of pivotal importance for America’s future.

If Sanders rises to the challenge, he can help unite progressive voters to win, not only the presidency, but a working majority of the Senate, House and U.S. Supreme Court. Those are high stakes indeed. But Sanders did not launch a campaign that won primaries and caucuses in 22 states to fade away as a short-lived blip on the 2016 political radar screen.

The stakes have been jacked up even higher by the wikileaks implicating DNC leaders, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in partisan advocacy of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and opposition to Sanders, long before Clinton clinched the number of delegates needed to win the nomination. A significant number of Sanders suporters are understandably pissed off about it, and the Sanders campaign call for Wasserman Schultz’s resignation months ago was clearly justified, with benefit of hindsight.

It is important to put the wikileaks controversy in context. There are reports that the leaks were engineered by Russian hackers, likely at Putin’s behest, a disturbing possibility considering the warm relationship between Putin and Trump. There should be no doubt, however, about the timing of the leaks being designed to manipulate public opinion against the Clinton campaign. In that sense, one question is, how many American voters will allow themselves to be manipulated by Russian meddling in our politics.

That possibility is made even more unsavory by Trump’s piling on about the wikileaks, and his direct appeals to Sanders voters to support his candidacy. Chances are he won’t get many votes from angry Sanders voters, most of whom are too sophisticated to get suckered by the likes of Trump.  The greater concern for Democrats is the possibility that increased numbers of Sanders supporters will stay home or vote for Libertarian or Green party presidentical candidates, which is not so different in effect from voting for Trump.

The Republicans will want to put the worst possible face on the controversy, and they will imply again and again, without any proof, that the DNC favoritism was instigated by the Clinton campaign, even though it looks like the DNC leadership was so partisan they didn’t need any encouragement.

Sanders is not the only important speaker tonight. Elizabeth Warren will deliver the keynote address to the convention, and her speech will also be closely watched by millions of progressives nationwide. She, too, has a critical role to play in uniting progressives to defeat Trump. First Lady Michelle Obama provides another big draw. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Sen. Cory Booker will also speak to the convention tonight.

I expect that both Sanders and Warren will do their best to support Clinton. Anyone who has paid close attention to Sanders during the last year — and throughout his career — can see that he is wholly dedicated to the vision of a progressive future for America. His campaign, contrary to comments made by some of his critics, has never been about gratifying his ego. By any fair measure, he is one of the most deeply-committed U.S. Senators, always focused on reforms to advance social and economic justice.

Some Democrats grumbled that Sanders didn’t support Clinton fast enough, after she clinched the needed number of delegates to win the nomination. Both he and Clinton wanted to time his endorsement for the optimum moment when it could do the most good. I will be greatly surprised if he doesn’t do everything he can to defeat Trump and elect Clinton.

Wasserman Schultz has tendered her resignation as head of the DNC, effective at the end of the convention. As of this writing, however, she is still expected to address the convention. This may be a really bad idea, especially since she has not yet apologized to Sanders. Her appearance could be the most divisive moment of the convention and would likely invite protest both inside and outside the convention center.

Part of the dilemma facing Democratic leaders is that Wasserman Schultz has been a highly-effective fund-raiser for Democrats, particularly in Florida, a critically-important swing state. She also did an excellent job of organizing the 2012 Democratic convention. No doubt Clinton and the Obama Administration are looking for a way to allow her to save face, while playing a diminished public role at the convention. If she has real dedication to the success of the Democratic Party, however, she should take the initiative and bow out gracefully.

So day one of the Democratic convention will have more than its share of high drama and reason for good ratings. If Democrats, lead by Sanders and Warren, can leverage the increased public attention into an opportunity to educate and inspire the confidence of millions of American voters, this can be another Democratic convention that shows which political party is best prepared to govern wisely.

Immediately after Hillary Clinton’s announcement of Sen. Tim Kaine as her running-mate, I discussed at New York some of the negative sentiment expressed about this option even before it was exercised:

For all the talk of Kaine as a sort of political wallflower, he is actually an estimable man who has won losable campaigns in a state Republicans may need to win this year. He has a reputation as being ethically spotless, which matters a lot this year — any hint of scandal in a running mate could be disastrous for Clinton. As has often been noted, he is fluent in Spanish, which is not only a good weapon in a campaign against Donald “Deport ‘Em All” Trump, but a sop to those who were disappointed that the Veep was not Hispanic.

Despite the pushback from progressive Democrats when Kaine emerged as the front-runner for this gig, he’s by no means some sort of warmed-over Blue Dog. He’s a career civil rights lawyer in what was then a pretty conservative state — let that sink in for a bit. He was also the mayor of a relatively large and diverse city. He was elected governor despite an opponent pounding him relentlessly for a faith-based opposition to capital punishment, and he was smart and agile enough to turn the issue around and make it a positive. These are all good signs of both Democratic orthodoxy and political dexterity.

The one issue on which progressives have asked very legitimate questions about Kaine involves another faith-based position: his “personal opposition” to abortion. He’s been about as clear as possible in recent weeks that he’s firmly and comprehensively pro-choice, as he would absolutely have to be in a Hillary Clinton administration where the president is not exactly going to have to consult him or anyone else on this issue.

So the heartburn from the left that’s undoubtedly being felt tonight almost entirely involves economic issues, and beyond that, the sense that choosing Kaine is an insult to Bernie Sanders’ following, which could also provide an opening for Donald Trump.

In a vaccum Kaine’s unfortunately timed expressions of support for less regulation of regional banks, and for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aren’t necessarily deal-breakers for a Veep. The first issue does not involve the biggest banks that are the target of progressive ire, and the second, after all, aligns him with the Democratic President of the United States, whose popularity throughout the party remains high despite occasional lefty grumbling.

But Kaine’s economic heresies highlight the fact that Sanders supporters (and even some more ideologically liberal supporters of her own) expected Clinton to move towards rather than away from them in choosing a running-mate. Given the Clinton family reputation for taking the Left for granted or even triangulating against it, raising Kaine to the ticket plays some bad old tapes in the minds of many progressives. And it’s not like the Virginian has the sort of inspirational personal story that’s going to appeal to the young Sanders voters whose November turnout levels are in doubt. With the Republican nominee posturing as an anti-Wall Street, anti-status quo candidate, there may even be fears that Kaine will expose the ticket to further erosion of white working class support.

You have to figure Hillary Clinton is counting on Bernie Sanders (with a supporting cast of other progressives, including passe-over Veep prospects Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown) to put a halt to any serious revolt against the Kaine selection when he speaks in Philadelphia. Endorsements aside, the most important thing the Clinton-Kaine ticket has going for it in avoiding disunity is the alternative, made so plain in Cleveland this last week. As a progressive acquaintance of mine put it earlier this week when Kaine started looking inevitable: “On one side of the scales you’ve got a ticket made up of two people with troubling attitudes towards the financial sector. On the other side, you’ve got maybe fascism. They are not even remotely of the same weight.”

In that sense, the Clinton-Kaine ticket is “safe” in a more fundamental sense, and even “boring” is not so bad when compared to the bellowing bully-boy who was nominated in Cleveland.

After giving some thought overnight to Donald Trump’s big and nasty speech in Cleveland, I offered these observations at New York:

Donald Trump’s law-and-order thematics in his acceptance speech Thursday night offered little documentation for his claim that the country is ablaze with violent crime. Yes, he mentioned a spike in homicides in selected cities, and that’s real, though the experts tell us it’s unclear at this point whether it reflects a general increase in violent crime after decades of steady declines or just a blip.

But you know what? Trump doesn’t care. That there is a perception of a “crime wave” is enough to create a demand for a “law and order” politician, and that posture fits in so beautifully with his overall persona and message that it’s not surprising he chose it as central to his campaign.

For the same reasons, Trump feels no particular need to offer solutions to the quasi-problem of crime he has highlighted. As Matt Yglesias notes today, the president of the United States has but a limited role in dealing with street crime, but has some tools — yet Trump didn’t mention any last night (or in other recent pronouncements) other than the determination to appoint tough prosecutors and law-enforcement officials (and that was probably thrown into the speech as an allusion to the FBI’s decision not to ask for criminal charges against Hillary Clinton rather than having anything to do with violent crime).

But the lack of specific policy ideas is hardly a new thing for Trump. Yglesias attributes it to laziness and limited staffing. While that could be part of the rationale for vagueness on crime and many other issues, an even simpler explanation is that Trump’s whole platform is himself, a strongman in the ancient tradition of tribal chieftains whose very presence is a guarantor of safety and prosperity. Whatever the problem is, he’ll “fix it,” and that’s particularly true of challenges where “strength” is, in theory, of inherent value, such as maintaining a credible deterrent to foreign aggression, negotiating trade agreements, or in general threatening law breakers with violence. Adopting policies like other politicians actually undercuts this message, so Trump doesn’t bother with them. The convention managers last night might as well have emblazoned on the screen behind him Pontius Pilate’s words in presenting Jesus to the people of Jerusalem: Ecce homo! Behold the man!

Yes, strongman politics reassures some people and frightens others, and that’s fundamentally why Trump is such a polarizing figure, and also why his supporters thought his speech last night was a home run, while his detractors thought it was straight out of the Mussolini playbook in length, tone, and substance. When Trump and other speakers last night spoke of “making American one again,” it was clear the rapturous delegates in the hall really did think a strong father figure could somehow quell dissent. To the rest of us, the unity talk sounded like a threat to all of the “others” in this country to shut up or risk the silence of the grave.

At Daily Kos Greg Dworkin rounded up some insightful and funny tweets responding to Trump’s 75-minute GOP convention speech, including:

David Brooks: “Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution…It’s going to end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained…Some rich children are careless that way; they break things and other people have to clean up the mess.”

Ezra Klein: “He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash….He has not become more responsible or more sober, more decent or more generous, more considered or more informed, more careful or more kind. He has continued to retweet white supremacists, make racist comments, pick unnecessary fights, contradict himself on the stump, and show an almost gleeful disinterest in building a real campaign or learning about policy.”

No matter how much lipstick Trump’s spin doctors put on the pig, there’s no denying that Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement stole the show — and the headlines — describing day 3 of the GOP convention.

“Cruz Speech Exposes Cracks in G.O.P.,” got the big headline type on the front page of the Thursday morning edition of the New York Times.

The Washington Post lead with “Attempt for unity falls short as Cruz upstages Pence.”

The  Los Angeles Times went with “Day 3 of the GOP convention restarts the war over conservatism.”

“Ted Cruz Snubs Donald Trump: Vote Your Conscience” blared the headline at the Chicago Sun-Times.

At the host city’s portal, cleveland.com, it was “Ted Cruz gets booed, but he also gets the better of Donald Trump: Wednesday’s RNC takeaways.”

In his Thursday New York Times column, Frank Bruni summed it up,

…Cruz had made his point and done his damage, providing the latest (and most vivid) illustration of how little control Trump has been able to exert over his own coronation, how much rancor he has failed to exorcise, how few bridges he has succeeded in repairing, how far short he has fallen in making these four days in Cleveland as dazzling and exciting as he’d long promised they would be.

In other words, yet another day of botched opportunities and convention mismanagement under the stewardship of a candidate whose claim to fame is his business acumen.

Trump can’t be very happy with the way Cruz’s diss played out. He tried to spin-tweet it as an indication of his tolerance for free speech, since he claims he expected it. He may have been hoping for a last minute gesture of support from Cruz, despite the fact that Trump never apologized for implying that Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination, insulting Cruz’s wife or calling Cruz “Lying Ted.”

Veep nominee Pence nonetheless showed he has some public speaking chops and did a competent job of introducing himself and larding out unmerited praise of his running-mate. However, as Ed Kilgore noted at New York Magazine, “once again, Trump has lost control of his own convention. Pity poor Mike Pence, the ostensible headliner of the evening, whose introduction to the convention was already under the cloud of the Trump-Cruz confrontation — the only thing that people will be talking about in the hours after this session.”

Not much else was newsworthy on Day 3. Scott Walker was predictably ineffectual, while wingnut radio yakker Laura Ingraham generated some excitement, though she may want to work on her hand gestures.

Despite the mismanagement of the convention so far, tonight Trump delivers the most important speech of his political career. The suspense will be in how much he reads from the teleprompter script vs. going off on an extemporaneous rant. Trump is not very good at working the teleprompter, as was the GOP’s sainted Ronald Reagan. If the convention substance so far is any indication, his addresss will be long on Obama/Clinton-bashing, but very short on ideas.

Meanwhile, Clinton and her fellow Democrats can only be encouraged by President Obama’s improving approval rates, a pretty reliable indicator of the success of the party in the White House in upcoming elections.

For those who couldn’t bear to watch another day of the GOP convention after the opening night mess, The New York Times offers “Republican Convention Day 2: Analysis,” a roundtable featuring real time commentary by their team of political reporters, including Nick Confessore, Maggie Haberman, Adam Nagourney and Alan Rappeport.

Their overall consensus is that Day 2 was a comparatively tame affair, with the exception of Chris “Bridgegate” Christie’s Hillary-bashing, even though Christie himself still faces a federal investigation. Ed Kilgore probes the weird and poorly stage-managed strategy behind the formal nomination of Trump on Day 2. Other than that, there were a couple of yawners by McConnell and Ryan, an endless parade of no-namers, along with “my dad is a nice guy” speeches by Trump’s children, who the NYT panel says did well enough.

The ‘Trump is a nice guy’ meme, which was painstakingly inserted into Monday night speeches as well, seems to be an ongoing concern of his image gurus, probably because Democrats have banked plenty of videos indicating otherwise (This one will do for exhibit “A”). No presidential candidate in history has been more thoroughly exposed on video as mean-spirited at the core, and projecting him as a ‘nice guy’ is going to be a very tough sell.

That’s the short explanation why so many Republican Senate candidates are keeping their distance. Not that they care all that much about Trump’s lack of compassion and decency; they just don’t want to be his  collateral damage on election day. In his post, “Is distance from Trump a good reelection strategy for GOP senators?” at The Monitor, Aidan Quigley explains:

As Republicans from across the country gather in Cleveland for the party’s convention, several vulnerable Republican senate incumbents have decided to sit out the convention in an effort to distance themselves from presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.

As Democrats try to tie these incumbents to their party’s standard-bearer, Republican senators are staying in their home states to campaign instead of making the trip to Cleveland. Four of the seven Republican senators running for reelection in states that President Obama won twice are staying home..

“For the ones who are running in swing states or Democratic leaning states, it’s a necessary strategy to survive,” Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, tells The Christian Science Monitor.

Increases in polarization, partisanship and straight-ticket voting make it difficult for Senate incumbents to escape the “downdraft” from Trump at the top of the ticket, he says. He expects Trump to lose in most of the Senate battleground “swing states”, which will force the incumbents to try to gain votes from voters who vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president. This is a very difficult challenge, he says.

“Pretty much all of them, to varying degrees, are trying to distance themselves from Trump to run on their own record and separate themselves as much as possible, to try to localize the election,” he says. “The problem is that voters increasingly see these choices they’re making in Senate and House elections as not just choices about who they want to represent them in their own state, or their own district, but as which party do they want to control the House or Senate.”

Quigley explains the art of Trump avoidance, as practiced by Republican Sens. McCain, Toomey, Portman, Rubio and Ayotte. Quigley closes with a salient observation by Abramowitz: “Republican candidates will try to separate themselves from Trump as much as possible, and try to localize the races. Democrats are going to try to nationalize the races,” he says. “In recent elections, the side that tries to nationalize the race has generally been more successful.”

For Democratic strategists, the hope is that Republicans will over-invest in doomed Senate candidates, while under-investing in endangered House seats. If that scenario unfolds in a blue wave election, the Republican legislative blockade will crumble into memory.

If the Republican Convention’s opening day is an indication of the acrid tone Trump’s campaign will pursue leading up to the election, Hillary Clinton will have no trouble projecting herself as the only presidential candidate with a positive vision for America’s future.

Speaker after splenetic speaker at the convention attacked the Democratic nominee-apparent, and several of them called for her imprisonment to the cheers of delegates on the floor, some of whom could fairly be likened to near-rabid Salem witch-hunters. Some speakers vented their outrage against African Americans protesting against police brutality and illegal immigrants, blaming Hillary Clinton/President Obama even for tragic accidents that occurred during the Obama Administration.

Paul Begala observed at cnn,.com, “The first night of Donald Trump’s convention was as messy, undisciplined and undignified as Trump himself. If Donald Trump’s hairdo held a convention it would look like this.” Begala credits Melania Trump with the only grace notes of the evening, but adds that some of her best lines were plagiarized directly from Michelle Obama. “I do not blame Mrs. Trump for this,” said Begala. “She is a political neophyte. But her husband and his team should have been especially sensitive after The New York Times reported on Trump Institute’s plagiarism a few weeks ago.

Tonight, it would be hard for the Republicans to match the orgy of sulphurous contempt that defined their opening night. But some will surely try. Tonight’s speakers include Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan, N.J. Gov. Chris Christie and Dana White. Trump will officially become the nominee tonight, and “each state will ceremoniously announce how their delegation will vote, and since Trump has secured enough delegates through the primaries and caucuses…He’ll be the man in the general election starting Tuesday night,” reports Eliza Collins at USA Today.

When the GOP presidential campaign kicked off last year, no one could have imagined that the 2016 Republican convention would be boycotted by both Bush presidents, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain and John Kasich and that the GOP nominee would be disparaged by nearly every conservative pundit. These politicians and pundits now look wise in comparison to the Trump puppets who have now  seized control of the Republican Party.

TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore previews the GOP convention in his Daily Intelligencer post at New York Magazine: “The general feeling here in Cleveland a day before the formal opening of the 2016 Republican National Convention is that any drama is most likely to occur outside the arena, in some configuration of a three-cornered battle involving pro- and anti-Trump protesters and the Cleveland police…It’s the general disorder in the planning of this convention that sustains some speculation about the possibility of the unexpected occurring inside the arena…But in terms of efforts to loosen the grip of Trump and the RNC over the convention’s rules and platform, it’s probably all over but the shouting…”

In his syndicated column “GOP, RIP?” E. J. Dionne, Jr. has an eloquent take on the coarsening of the Republican Party as they begin the Trump convention. “…Republicans who are not in the least progressive have reason to mourn what is likely to come to pass this week: the transformation of the Party of Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower into the Party of Trump. Some are bravely resisting this outcome to the end — and good luck to them. A fair number of leading Republicans have stated flatly that they will never vote for Trump. Their devotion to principle and integrity will be remembered.” Citing Trump’s “politics of flippant brutality,” Dionne adds, “hypocrisy really is the tribute vice pays to virtue and so it does mark a decline in simple decency that Trump has shouted out his prejudices openly…He substitutes bullying for choosing, bluster for strength…”

In terms of issues and themes, expect increasingly shrill calls for “law and order” to dominate the GOP quadrennial convention, in the wake of the shootings of police in Louisiana and Dallas. As Alexander Burns reports at The New York Times, “Mr. Trump has campaigned on the theme of “law and order” since the assassination this month of five police officers in Dallas, and he is likely to amplify that message in the coming days…While Republicans often run on law-and-order themes, an indelicate approach could carry considerable danger at a moment of such unusual political instability…But some local officials have expressed concern about the possibility of violence owing to Ohio’s open-carry gun laws. Though demonstrators and others in the convention district have been barred from possessing a range of items, including gas masks, there was no prohibition on the brandishing of firearms…On Sunday, the president of Cleveland’s police union called for additional measures to protect the security of the event, and urged Mr. Kasich to suspend open-carry gun rights.” Kasich, thus far, has refused to do so.

At Post Politics John Wagner’s, “As GOP convenes, Clinton plans to launch major voter mobilization drive” observes “Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton plans to announce a major voter mobilization effort on Monday that will aim to add more than 3 million people to rolls by November to bolster her odds against Republican Donald Trump…Aides to Clinton said they intend to make voter registration a major focus at every level of the campaign, including among coordinated Democratic drives in key states. This week alone, they said, more than 500 registration-themed events will take place across the country.”

Meanwhile, from The Brennan Center for Justice: “Today, senior congressional lawmakers introduced the Automatic Voter Registration Act of 2016, a transformative bill that would add up to 50 million new voters by automatically registering eligible citizens to vote…In the past 16 months, five states, several with bipartisan support, have adopted automatic registration, through the department of motor vehicles. Oregon, the first state to fully implement the plan, is now a national leader in voter registration rates, and has quadrupled its rate of new registrations at the DMV compared to previous years.”

“Democratic strategists are now talking up not only Illinois and Wisconsin but also Indiana as easy wins, a scenario which leaves Democrats just one seat short of Senate control if Clinton beats Trump. Republicans fear their party could be letting one go if it doesn’t respond to Bayh and the $10 million he already had sitting in his old campaign account when he announced his new run last week. — from “Vulnerable Senate Republicans outpolling Trump” by Burgess Everett and Kevin Robillard at Politico.

In her Los Angeles Times op-ed “The Democrats’ demographic firewall is under attack,” Emory University professor Carol Anderson writes: “A recent study by political scientists at UC San Diego found that in elections held between 2008 to 2012 in states with strict voter ID laws “turnout among Democrats in general elections dropped an estimated 7.7 percentage points, while Republican turnout dropped 4.6 percentage points.” Even more telling, strong liberals’ voter turnout rates plummeted 10.7 percentage points, whereas the decline for strong conservatives was only 2.8%…Four of seven key swing states in the upcoming election, as well as North Carolina, Indiana and Wisconsin, which were crucial in either 2008 or 2012, have Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement statutes in place. We’ve already seen a dress rehearsal for what might happen in November. The midterm 2014 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections in Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama were all decided in favor of Republicans by a margin smaller than the number of disenfranchised voters in each state.”

Greg Allen explains why “Which Way Florida Goes Hinges On Puerto Rican Voters.” Allen notes, “According to the Pew Research Center, Puerto Ricans make up 27 percent of eligible Hispanic voters in the state, rivaling the 31 percent of eligible Hispanics who are Cuban-Americans…”This year is one of the tests of how strong the Puerto Rican vote has gotten,” says Esteban Garces, with the voter education group Mi Familia Vota. “Eventually, Puerto Ricans, if this trend continues, may outnumber the number of Cubans we have in this state.”…State Sen. Darren Soto represents the area in the legislature. He says Puerto Ricans have been a key swing vote in the state’s most important swing region — central Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor — since at least 2008. “We helped put President Barack Obama on top and helped him win his re-election,” Soto says. “At the end of the day, it’s no secret that the candidate that wins the I-4 corridor, so goes Florida.

For those who were wondering about the cultural/entertainment offerings of the GOP convention, read “Scrambling, Planners of the Republican Convention Put ‘Showbiz’ Off to the Wings” by NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Jeremy W. Peters. The authors report that Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson is the headliner, and “actors from “The Young and the Restless,” “General Hospital” and “Charles in Charge” will also participate. Martin and Peters also quote Tommy Valentine, a delegate from Virginia, who dryly observes “This is not what I’d call A-list.” Trump has reportedly caved on his insistance that boxing promoter Don King address the convention, after “Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman, firmly explained to Mr. Trump why Mr. King should not be invited: He once stomped a man to death and was convicted of manslaughter,” which might not go so well with the expected calls for “law and order.” At The Daily Beast Betsy Woodruff profiles this charmer, who has reportedly been given a speaking slot at the convention. But whatever levity can be, ahem, goosed out of the looming potential for disaster the GOP convention provides will likely be found at The Late Show, where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will riff on the proceedings. As Frank Zappa once observed, “Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”

From Erik Wemple’s “Top Beltway journalists cling to heinous assertion of Trump-Clinton false equivalence” at The Washington Post:

When top Beltway journalists Carol Lee of the Wall Street Journal and Jeff Mason of Reuters made the case in a USA Today op-ed that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump posed similar threats to a free and independent press, they weren’t suffering a momentary lapse of judgment. Or writing imprecisely in a rush to meet a deadline. Or some other such innocent explanation.

They meant it.

In a statement to the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone, Lee and Mason — the outgoing and incoming presidents, respectively, of the White House Correspondents’ Association — explain what they were explaining:

“The White House Correspondents’ Association defends the First Amendment in the context of the presidency, and, as such, speaks up when a presumptive nominee from either party falls short. Our op-ed laid out legitimate and different concerns that we have about each candidate with regard to the press. We did not render a verdict on which candidate poses more of a problem; people can draw their own conclusions about that. To suggest that we were somehow presenting a “false equivalency” misses our point.

This is not about comparing one candidate with the other; it is about scrutinizing how the candidates would conduct themselves in the White House in relation to the press. We were clear in our op-ed about what concerns we have with Hillary Clinton and with Donald Trump on that specific point. We will advocate strongly for the winner in November to respect a free press based on the principles of the First Amendment, not on a scale shaped by his or her rival.”

That statement lacks one thing, which is the ring of truth.

The offending USA Today op-ed by Lee and Mason actually compared “one candidate with the other”; it actually presented “false equivalency”; it actually blurred and steamrolled the significant differences between the candidates. It’s all in these two paragraphs:

The public’s right to know is infringed if certain reporters are banned from a candidate’s events because the candidate doesn’t like a story they have written or broadcast, as Donald Trump has done.

Similarly, refusing to regularly answer questions from reporters in a press conference, as Hillary Clinton has, deprives the American people of hearing from their potential commander-in-chief in a format that is critical to ensuring he or she is accountable for policy positions and official acts.

Bolding added to highlight the smoking gun of false equivalency: that the anti-media policies of these two candidates are similar. The headline helps level the playing field, too: “Trump, Clinton both threaten free press.” As does the piece’s kicker: “Both Clinton and Trump can do better.”

The beauty of journalism is that once you’ve written a piece, you may retain the byline or even the copyright, but you don’t own the interpretations. That’s the prerogative of readers. Here, the message is clear — Clinton and Trump are co-threats to a free press in the United States. There was no effort to contextualize this message, no qualifiers, no reality check. That Lee and Mason chose to recommit themselves to a deeply flawed piece says a great deal about the catechism of “fairness” in old-line media organizations. They’re all bad, equally bad, goes the apparent thinking.

And let’s directly attack the common and facile fallback line that “people can draw their own conclusions.” Oh, no they cannot, Lee and Mason, because you two didn’t provide a comprehensive list of Trump’s and Clinton’s transgressions. You abridged the list to facilitate false equivalency. This is awful.

To recap the imbalance between Trump’s and Clinton’s approaches to the media, we’ll re-run the list of offenses cataloged in this blog’s initial post on this absurdity:

Trump campaign:

• Bashing outlet after outlet after outlet in his speeches, often using descriptors like “disgusting” and even calling one reporter a “sleaze” on national television;

• Singling out camera operators at his rallies for failing to pan the crowd. “Look at the guy in the middle. Why aren’t you turning the camera? Terrible. So terrible. Look at him, he doesn’t turn the camera. He doesn’t turn the camera,” said Trump;

• Promising to “open up” the country’s libel laws to make it easier to sue media organizations;

• Denying press credentials to various news organizations based on unfavorable coverage. They include the The Post, Politico, the Daily Beast, Univision, Fusion, the Des Moines Register and the Huffington Post;

• Expressing frustration with the media for investigating his record of charitable donations;

• Suing a former campaign aide for violating a confidentiality agreement by speaking with the media;

• Hassling reporters for not staying in their designated pen at rallies;

• Boycotting a Fox News debate over vague concerns about one of its hosts;

• Grabbing and pushing reporters;

• Hyping a bogus National Enquirer story that spun conspiracy theories about the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.);

• Failing to condemn the anti-Semitic backlash against a reporter who’d written about Trump’s wife, Melania Trump.

Clinton campaign:

• Herding media reps into a roped-off area at a New Hampshire event in 2015;

• Failing to make herself available to reporters on the campaign trail and in news-conference settings.

An alert Twitter user added to the lopsidedness:

 Very good point.

Some insightful comments from readers follow at the end of Wemple’s post.

I’ve been watching Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for a while, and so was prepared when his name finally emerged as Donald Trump’s running-mate. Here are some observations I made at New York:

The more you look at Pence’s recent career…the more he looks like a running mate who checks all the boxes for Trump, but very faintly.

Most notably, this supposed Republican-unity figure has been struggling in his gubernatorial reelection campaign. You get the distinct sense Hoosier Republicans are pleased to hand him off to Trump so that they can put a better candidate into the race to succeed him. That’s not a very good sign.

From the beginning of his tenure in Indianapolis, Pence has looked diminished by the long shadow of his Republican predecessor, Mitch Daniels, generally rated as a successful chief executive even by Democrats. His meh reputation turned toxic in 2015 when by virtually all accounts he bungled an effort to enact a “religious liberty” law, only to backtrack when his state became the target for high-profile boycott threats from businesses, the NCAA, and even churches. His “fix” of the law to make it less egregiously hostile to the basic rights of LGBT folk left no one satisfied.

The fallout hasn’t really dissipated. Pence’s reputation as an unshakable social conservative is supposedly one of the qualities he brings to Trump, whose own standing with Christian conservatives is as fragile as that “little cracker” (as he calls it) he consumes on occasion at church communion celebrations. So it must be unsettling to Team Trump to hear Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins pause during his largely successful efforts to ride herd on the Republican platform committee to diss the Indiana governor:

“Family Research Council head Tony Perkins told NBC News’ Leigh Ann Caldwell at the RNC’s Platform Committee meeting today that he believes Trump ‘can do better,’ citing Pence’s wavering support for the religious freedom bill he signed into law. ‘I think he can do better with someone who has not capitulated on something as fundamental as religious freedom,’ Perkins said.”

Pence also has a reputation as a rock-ribbed economic conservative. But it’s not clear it would survive the upcoming flip-flops over trade and other economic issues he’d have to execute as Trump’s running mate. A video of him praising NAFTA and other past and future trade agreements on the House floor is already circulating.

Speaking of the House, Pence did not sponsor a single enacted law in 12 years as a congressman. He used to get credit from conservative activists for a two-year chairmanship of the House Republican Study Committee, for decades the conservative group that acted as an ideological commissar monitoring the eternally suspect House Republican leadership. Shortly after Pence’s departure, though, the RSC was impatiently pushed aside by what became the House Freedom Caucus, whose members denounced the RSC as false-flag RINO defenders of the leadership. Another line on Pence’s résumé began to fade.

More generally, this man once considered presidential timber has shown himself to be a tad slow on his feet. You have to wonder how he would fare in a debate against a sharp-witted Democrat like Elizabeth Warren or really any of the figures on Clinton’s short list for veep.

So sure, he’s less perilous than Gingrich or Christie, and not in any danger of upstaging the Boss (unless it’s with a gaffe). He ostensibly helps to mend fences with anti-Trump conservatives, but it’s worth keeping in mind #NeverTrump conservative leader Erick Erickson’s sardonic reaction to reports of Pence’s selection:

“This will be both fun to watch and vicariously humiliating for so many who for so long backed Pence.”

If I had to guess, I’d figure that Pence will soon fade into the background and give Trump what he probably wanted all along: a ticket of Trump looking into a mirror.

So yeah, this is an underwhelming decision.