That Convention

What an awful spectacle, without even the pretense of it being an actual convention. It is simply a coronation, with every single speaker praising the Messiah Obama. “We will nominate Obama,” they all admit from the beginning.

And what is the program they offer? Change. Variation. No more of the same failed policies of the last seven years. At least that’s the rhetoric. Here’s the reality: More foreign intervention (which is why the Dems are so desperate to salvage the face of U.S. diplomacy abroad) and a litany of new social programs: Programs to give everyone health care, to even out the economy, to keep house prices from falling and energy prices from rising, to boost wages, to promote “green” “energy independence,” and to finally guarantee to each American that great education that hundreds of billions of dollars a year just hasn’t been able to achieve.

So far, the most exhilarating speech by a mile has been Dennis Kucinich’s. Kucinich attacks the warfare state, empire, despotism, torture and surveillance, as well as the mercantilist interests getting rich off a government-distorted economy. Of course, most of his domestic solutions for the economy would be terrible, but at least he is fairly sound on civil liberty and military questions, while altogether offering a substantive alternative to the Republican agenda. Unfortunately, even he ends his electrifying speech with a hail to the party leaders, Obama and Biden, two establishment centrist warmongering Dems who will offer little variation from the McCain platform. The specific mix of socialism and war will indeed be somewhat different, but only somewhat. We will get more of both under either.

Meanwhile, outside the convention, Denver has become a city at siege by militarized police conduct.