Were you watching the last night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday night? It looked like a Nuremberg rally on Nembutal. Whatever they gave him before he took the stage overlooking the back lawn of the White House, they managed to get max-automaton out of him. Holding onto the podium like he was on the deck of a pitching ship at sea, Trump droned through 70 minutes of his acceptance speech like a seventh-grader giving a book report on "Great Expectations" in English class. He had that strange singsong delivery he does when he's reading off a teleprompter: sentence … pause … phrase … pause … now comes the big applause line and they clap and it says I can look at the audience and give them a smile and point to someone ...

"We know that voting will not end our pain. Voting cannot bring back those killed by the police officers sworn to protect us. Voting cannot erase the scars of slavery and segregation. It cannot change our history, but it can change our future.

"If it couldn't, those in power wouldn't be trying so hard to take the right to vote away from us. They wouldn't be trying so hard to erect barriers to the ballot box."