Where's the Beef?

I've been listening to the speeches at the Dem Convention the last two nights. Not all the time, after all the Brewers are in a pennant race. I do have priorities. Anyway, as I listened I found myself becoming excited about our chances in November. The governor from Montana (what's his name?) was quirky in his delivery, but said all the right things. Hillary actually moved me with her speech. I like Hillary, but her speechifying has never impressed me. I missed President Clinton's talk, but Joe Biden was damn good -- I especially liked his denunciation of John McCain's ("his friend") stances and his all too willingness to continue the Bush legacy.

But there was something missing. I couldn't put a finger on it, so I went back to my game, later putting the kids to bed and then myself.

Today's been busy with household chores. My mother is coming to visit from Arkansas. I'm very happy to have her with us for two weeks. As I cleaned and picked up, I couldn't help but continue to wonder what it was that was bothering me about the convention. I took a timeout and jumped around some of my featured sites and lo -- one can always count on Greenwald.

I have got to get back to work, but here are a couple of paragraphs from his opinion piece today that hit the target dead center on what has been missing (followed by a link).

First, there is almost no mention of, let alone focus on, the sheer radicalism and extremism of the last eight years. During that time, our Government has systematically tortured people using sadistic techniques ordered by the White House; illegally and secretly spied on its own citizens; broken more laws than can be counted based on the twisted theory that the President has that power; asserted the authority to arrest and detain even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and hold them for years without charges; abolished habeas corpus; created secret prisons in Eastern Europe and a black hole of lawlessness in Guantanamo; and explicitly abandoned and destroyed virtually every political value the U.S. has long claimed to embrace.

Other than a fleeting reference to such matters by John Kerry in a (surprisingly effective) speech which most networks did not broadcast, one would not know, listening to the Democratic Convention, that any of those things have happened. Even our unprovoked and indescribably destructive attack on Iraq, based on purely false pretenses, has received little attention. Those things simply don't exist, even as part of the itemized laundry list of Democratic grievances about the Bush administration. The overriding impression one has is that the only things really wrong during the last eight years in this country are that gas prices are high and not everyone has health insurance. Those are obviously very significant problems, but they are garden-variety political issues which don't begin to capture the extremism that has predominated in this country under GOP rule, and don't remotely approach conveying the crises on numerous fronts the country faces.

More here. Thanks, Glenn.