First day of the Democrat Convention. So far, it's not a phony show like the Republicans in Philadelphia. Good video about average Americans that have benefited from the Clinton-Gore administration's policy. Clinton's speech, as usual, was good. It's very easy to listen to him and his speaking skills are one reason he is so popular. Unfortunately, not many politicians have his ability with oratory. Many of them present themselves well when they are chatting with journalists or are answering questions, but few of them can grab the audience like Clinton can, and hold the attention for as long as he can talk.

Joe Lieberman has oratory skills also. He gets very chummy with the audience and quickly wins it over. He's witty and tells clever jokes. The one l liked was: the Republicans think that the best way to feed the birds is to feed oats to a horse. Another way of saying trickle down economics. We birds have to eat the rich horses shit.

This morning I was thinking about the radical left, who I dislike almost as much as the radical right. I've been thinking that they have helped the Republicans win elections because they can't discriminate between the two parties and they have caused more trouble for the Democrats than they deserve. An example of this is the radical left's violent theatrics at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, which helped create a backlash and propel the sociopath Nixon into the White House. Today I read an infuriating article in Vanity Fair about Nixon's sabotage of the Vietnam peace process before the 1968 election. Nixon met with President Thieu and told him that if he refused to come to the peace table before the election, Nixon would more than likely become president and give Vietnam and Thieu a better deal. This treachery did cost Humphery the election, stretched out the war for another four years, helped cause the horrible deaths of millions of Cambodians, as well as many more Americans who needlessly sacrificed their lives for the first and only sociopath in the White House.

The radical left was so disillusioned with the Johnson Administration and the Vietnam War that they decided all evil was located in the seat of the American government, despite the individual that sat in the White House. Since then they have been unable to see the evil that lurks in the hearts of others outside this country. They objected to the Gulf War and the help we gave to the Bosnians and the Kosovars, failing to understand the depth of the evil of Saddam Hussein and Milosovic. They would allow both men to slaughter thousands because they believed that our objectives in stopping them were only based on the availability of oil. This is extremely shortsighted and naive, and in the case of Clinton's actions in Kosovo, dead wrong.

This brings me to the subject of Ralph Nader, who I now find, unfortunately, rather disreputable. Robert Kennedy Jr., who is president of the Water Keeper Alliance and a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council writes in an article in the Press Democrat,Nader's Threat to the Environment,( reprinted from the New York Times) that Nader by cynically claiming that there is no difference between Gore and Bush is behaving irresponsibly. Should Nader's candidacy siphon off enough votes from Gore to elect Bush for president, the environment, which the Green Party finds so important, would be exploited by Bush's collegues who have a dismal environmental record in Texas as well as in the government when his father and Ronald Reagan were in the White House.

While Gore, Kennedy writes, helped Clinton repulse Gingrich and his minions from destroying 30 years of environmental protections. as well as help persuade the president to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Georgie W. Bush's appointees to Texas environmental agencies all worked in the chemical and oil industries. He has allowed some of the biggest polluters in Texas write laws that make compliance voluntary. Texas is 49th in the nation in money spent on the environment and it is now has the highest levels of air and water pollution and toxic releases.

Nader has said that if he wasn't running for President, he would vote for Bush, because he thinks that a Bush presidency would create a backlash large enough to push people further left. This was the rationale of the leftists who thought that electing Ronald Reagan would bring about a revolution. The radical right is not as stupid. They know that electing a Democrat will not push the nation further to the right, because Democrats can satisfy the masses in ways the Republicans can never manage to do. Not only does a revolution never occur, once a Republican is in office, it's hard to get him out unless there is an economic downturn, which there usually is, eventually. (Recessions and depressions generally take place while Republicans are in office because the rich, who put their party in office, are not readily affected by them, and the Republicans don't want government to interfere with the capitalist economy). It is hard to get the Republicans out of office because the media(not the print journalists but I'm speaking of the television networks) favor the Republicans and have the ability to persuade the masses by angling positive coverage towards the Republican Party and away from the Democrats. They tried to do this with the Clinton impeachment fiasco, but he was favored by two thirds of the populace and nothing they could do altered that percentage.