For you yung-uns out there...

...now you know exactly why everybody is so impressed by that nice Martin Luther King Jr. fella.

Mr. Zigzag Zell and his friends used to talk just so about uppity folk like Dr King what wanted a piece of that Mr. Schwarzenegger's Amercan Dream.

You just had a trip in the wayback machine to 1962.

Why, sure, some say, "he's a Democrat." Sort of. He's the Dixiecrat version, class of '48, pal of Strom. A guy who said of Lyndon Johnson--and other supporters of the Voting Rights Act: "He sold his soul to the negroes." Miller's right, the Democratic party did leave him. 50 years ago.

Now, here's the problem: Those weren't Democrat eyeballs rolling back in ecstasy at the Garden, nor "liberal" fists pumpin the sky, cheerin him on as he made enemies of the state out of the 50% of the country who currently don't buy that George Bush is Alexander the Great and George Washington rolled into one. Swing voters just love that kind of stuff.

Desperation makes you do unwise things. The BC-04 OODA Loop is cut.

Seems these guys agree:

Eric Zorn-Chicago Trib has transcripts of Miller's just-short-of-clinically-insane interviews on MSNBC and CNN right after his speech.

William Saletan goes nuclear: this is no longer just an ordinary election, he says, it's "becoming a referendum on democracy."

NewDonkey: "Not since Pat Buchanan's famous 'culture war' speech in 1992 has a major speaker at a national political convention spoken so hatefully, at such length, about the opposition. At the dark heart of the speech was the same old tired litany of lies and mischaracterizations about Kerry's Senate votes on military spending and weapons systems that BC04 has been retailing for many months."

From a time machine, Zell Miller himself criticizes his speech. Here's what he had to say in 2001: "John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington....John has worked to strengthen our military."

Andrew Sullivan: "[Miller's] speech tonight was in this vein, a classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric....The man's speech was not merely crude; it added whole universes to the word crude."

Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic: "It was one of the most vile political speeches in recent American history, every bit as offensive as Pat Buchanan's infamous call in 1992 for "religious war" and, perhaps, a little more disturbing. Buchanan's speech, after all, was an assault on decency. Last night Miller declared war on democracy."

Matt Yglesias, who was in the hall when Miller spoke: "I don't believe I've ever heard a more disgusting speech delivered in the English language. The fact that I couldn't see a single person on the floor who seemed to feel anything less than the utmost enthusiasm for that lunacy was, well, a bit disturbing."

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