political rhetoric

I've been watching the Democratic National Convention every night, and I'm full to the ears with political rhetoric.

I love it.

In undergraduate school at FSU I majored in Government, or what other universities call political science. I was in perhaps the last class to study the great themes and principles of American government, straight from the best political minds of the last 200-plus years. Within a year or two the department was taken over by the statisticians, the poll-takers, the bean-counters, people who believed there was nothing to believe if it wasn't backed up by an opinion survey. They began learning how to write questions and how to tally the answers. They dismissed the various writings I'd been reading as mere rhetoric.

Balderdash.

Without that rhetoric, you forget where you came from and why you are going where you are going. Without the rhetoric, you lose your way in the forest. You get to the grocery store and can't remember whether you need a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread, or two six-packs and a bag of potato chips.

The speakers at the DNC unloaded some of the finest rhetoric I've heard all year. Pomp and fury. Very serious profundities. Hilarious one-liners. Sound bites galore.

Now the Republicans will have their turn. I'm not going to watch, because I've been hearing their rhetoric for years. They will rail against tax-and-spend liberals. (They prefer no taxes, but spend like drunken sailors.) They will get righteously indignant over abortion, gay rights (or same-sex marriages, which seems easier for them to say), and their version of family values. They will explain that things are going so well in Iraq that we need to keep our troops there. They will talk about experience, although some of the great presidents had no more experience than Senator Obama has. They will remind themselves where they've been and why they are going where they think they are going.

If they are smart, they will keep George W. Bush behind the curtains and off the stage for as long as they can. Dubya has 20 weeks and 3 days left in office. That's 20 weeks and 2 days too long.