Not Zell Miller and Dick Cheney, or even the Twins, but rather the two speeches considered most popular and important by Republicans: Bush and Schwarzenegger. Now, Zell Miller’s speech is fun, and even the Republicans shoved him out on the street after all was said and done, but it is important to note that even the best of the rather pathetic convention was lukewarm at best.

First, Governor Schwarzenegger, who is picking up just where his predecessor actor/California Governor Ronald Reagan left off: fictionalizing history. During his speech, Schwarzenegger said:

“When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes.”

Well, not exactly. Soviet tanks had left Schwarzenegger’s home province of Styria two years before he was born.

“As a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left.”

Again, not quite. Between 1945 and 1970 (Schwarzenegger was born in 1947 and left Austria in 1968) Austria had conservative leaders, not Socialists:

What’s more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative-only government headed by People’s Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists as well as the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.

Schwarzenegger “confuses a free country with a Socialist one,” said Polaschek, referring to East European Communist officials’ routine descriptions of their countries as Socialist.

Polaschek saw the moderate Republican governor’s recollections at the convention as a tactical move. Schwarzenegger, he said, was “using the old Communist enemy image for Bush’s election campaign.”

“He did not speak as a historian, after all, but as a politician,” Polaschek said.

Norbert Darabos, a ranking official of Austria’s opposition Social Democratic Party, sharply criticized Schwarzenegger’s “disdain for his former homeland.”

“The Terminator is constructing a rather bizarre Austria image,” he said. (source)

And that’s just to start. It really wasn’t hard to see that Schwarzenegger was using hype instead of facts. The whole Communist-infested-Austria move was completely irrelevant to his thesis; instead, it was intended purely for effect, trying to revive Cold-War mentality and fears.

Schwarzenegger then posed Richard Nixon as his political hero, mentioning only what Nixon talked about, and nothing of what he actually did; he then attempted to do the same thing, to tell people by talk–not by action–why they should regard themselves as Republicans. According to Schwarzenegger, you’re a Republican if:

• you believe government should be accountable to the people, and not the other way around (which begs the question why Schwarzenegger supports the least accountable administration in living history);
• you believe a person should be treated as an individual, not as a member of an interest group (like the rich? or oil companies? or the NRA? or pro-life groups? or fundamentalists?);
• you believe your family knows how to spend your money better than the government does (after spending under Bush has skyrocketed, and the table-scrap tax cut has been eaten up by hidden Bush taxes and costs?);
• you believe our educational system should be held accountable for the progress of our children (like the were in Texas, where Bush policies inspired massive fraud and broke that system down?);
• you believe this country, not the United Nations, is the best hope of democracy in the world (yeah, because look how well Bush is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq);
• you believe we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism (with al Qaeda’s numbers swelling, Osama still at large, and terrorist activity soaring? Yeah, good job, George).

Schwarzenegger then tried to claim that “the other party says there are two Americas.” Excuse me? Wasn’t he listening to Barak Obama and just about every other Democrat? Schwarzenegger tried to claim that Bush’s decision to go into Iraq was an unpopular one–ha! Bush surged in the polls upon that action, and he even used it to win midterm elections–remember Andrew Card’s “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August”? It only hurt him in the polls when all of his claims about Iraq turned out to be massive lies. Bush knew Saddam didn’t have “massive stockpiles” or nuclear weapons, but he thought there would be enough sarin gas left over from a decade before that he could claim that he’d found WMD–and if he had, he would have been golden.

And then Schwarzenegger started making it sound like Bush, or possibly the Republican Party, was responsible for things that they weren’t: the Peace Corps (Kennedy), fighting AIDS in Africa (Bush has weaseled out of his promise to send $15 billion), the Berlin Wall (sorry, I forgot Reagan did that single-handedly), Tiananmen Square (Bush Sr. wimped out and did nothing except grant China favored nation trade status), and even Nelson Mandela, who gained his election victory only after sanctions, fought against tooth and nail by Republicans, succeeded in bringing down Apartheid.

In short, Schwarzenegger’s speech was little more than a corny recitation of feel-good fiction, with mangled history and hypocritical claims of Republican accomplishments that were nothing of the sort. Schwarzenegger wants you, like himself, to believe in the hype, not the facts.

Next up: Bush.