Unrelieved

Although the national Democratic nominating convention hasn't been held yet, everything is in place for B. Obama to be the nominee for President. The admission of defeat by H. Clinton along with her endorsement of Obama was the clincher.

With that, both candidates must be intensely relieved, after such a prolonged and hardfought campaign. Hundreds of millions in the U.S. and around the world must be happy, too.

I could be one of the few, if any, who are instead not all that overjoyed. In fact I wish that their contest could've somehow gone right on up till Election Day itself, because it had the all consuming virtue of preventing not as much being heard from or about the biggest bane of American life, that huge bloat of the Republican nasties.

Now it will become much more evident that all those villains and harridans are still around and just as toxic as ever. Now more will be heard especially of and from J. McCain, with louder roars and bleats.

But, come to think of it, that might not be all bad. Because what worthwhile program do he and his accomplices have to offer? Merely more of the same fiddle-faddle, so that maybe the shrewder Republican heads have been glad enough that McCain hasn't had a wide enough venue for floating his concepts, which will reveal the bankrupt nature of those and by extension their own "ideas." This is especially true when it comes to Iraq.

Lately McCain, relying heavily on his very loosely defined status as a "war hero," has been trying to use Iraq to embarrass Obama, though in fact, as GWBush's spiritual heir, you would think that Iraq would be the last thing that McCain would want to bring up. So, having been to Iraq eight times, first he scorns Obama for not having been there in two years, and then, in the patronizing style that is all too reminiscent of the Old South, he invites Obama, his idea of the untermensch or perhaps the babe in the woods, to go there with him.

First, however, shouldn't McCain demonstrate how his repeated visits were of any benefit to him, or any other American, or, most important of all, to any Iraqi? And surely -- unless one has tried to remain as ignorant of conditions in Iraq as if humanly possible -- you don't have to go there even once to know that things are in a big mess there, and many of the conditions if not all are worse than they were in Saddam Hussein's darkest days.

Of course, what McCain is thinking about isn't the Bush\Repub-induced plight of Iraq and its people. Instead all he has is mind is the political expediency of appearing to support what he considers to be still his fellow troops. But I would bet that instead of wondering when one of the candidates is toing to drop in there, they are much more interested in hearing someone assure them that the day is imminent when they no longer will be asked to pull still more duty in that land of sand and desolation in which humans have already lived and despoiled things for a millennium or two too long already.