The republican speeches - theme: change; tone: anger

I watched Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin give their speeches last night. Rudi seemed angry about something, and got angrier as he spoke. I thought it was interesting when he said that Sarah Palin was qualified to be vice President because she had been a mayor (implied - like he had been mayor of New York.) Somehow the mayor of a village of 6,000 people automatically has all the skills of a mayor of a city of 8 million. He essentially said that because Palin had been a mayor of the 6,000 person village of Wasilli, she could have stepped in and done Rudi's job as mayor of New York and will be able to handle the Presidency from day one is something happens to the ancient John McCain.

Then Sarah Palin came on. She sure loves the limelight, and it loves her. She speaks well. What she said was written for her, so it more reflects what the McCain camp thinks the Republican delegates wanted to hear than what Sarah Palin knows herself. But she delivers the speech rather well, though with an overall tone of sarcasm. I'll let the experts dissect what her speechwriters had her say, but she delivers it well.

I'd say the theme of the night was "Washington is broken and we need change!" but this has been delivered by the same guys who broke Washington and currently run it. It would have been nice if they had figured out that they had broken Washington and started to fix it instead of just having a convention to complain about it.

The anger and sarcasm set the tone. What are they angry about? I think it's like they know they have been right all along, but someone has blocked them from succeeding in creating their conservative Paradise. They haven't failed, someone has sabotaged them. They blame some strange group they call "Liberals" - like that upstart Senator Barack Obama. So they are angry. They are going to change the things they've been running for eight years.

As Kevin Drum said this morning

AND MORE: Josh Marshall's take: "To riff on the brilliance of the immortal Molly Ivins, I think I preferred this speech in the original German."