Mass tongue-bite

The Democrats’ tiresomely scripted speeches don’t include very much on the topic of the Iraq war, giving the impression that they’re scared of the Triumph of the Surge line. No surprise that Hillary stays away from the historic debacle with which she was and remains fully complicit. But you’d think all the focus on economic issues from everyone else under the sun might include the fact that we’ve taken a vast chunk of our national wealth and thrown it down the Mesopotamian toilet.

You’d think there’d be some criticism of the war profiteers, the unparalleled corruption, the suspicious links between the sitting vice president and the company that hauls in the cash and provides lousy services. You’d think there’d be a tiny reference somewhere to the dismantling of the Geneva Conventions and the shameful treatment of detainees.

Instead, we get only glancing references to failed Humvee armor in tearful recollections of the fallen soldier. Only Nancy Pelosi managed to mention the trillion-dollar waste although she stumbled on the line as if it stirred her guilty conscience. And of course no one has a word to say about Guantánamo.

We’ll hear from Lestat the Undead tonight, and it will be interesting to see if he has anything to say about our collapsing foreign policy or whether he’ll continue the nonstop pandering to the pocketbook. I guess that’s the way you win elections here, but globalization was supposed to make us more aware of our planet and less parochial. So far, there’s not a shred of evidence of that.