And It's On! Surprise! Hillary is the Nominee!

Like the old Colombo TV show, where the viewer saw the crime and the criminal at the beginning, and the rest of the show involved the process by which clever Lt. Colombo attained the knowledge we all had, so it was with the Democratic nomination process. We all knew who the criminal nominee of the party would be, and the show was about the maneuvers and dirty tricks by which the DNC ensured it would be Hillary Clinton. Well, the finale was last night, and--Surprise!--Hillary Clinton is the nominee. The hapless Bernie Sanders was relegated in his dotage to obscurity, sent off like a disgraced Don Quixote, lance broken on the DNC's steel-reinforced windmills.

I watched much of the DNC convention, not all, and herewith present some observations to add my notes to the punditry noise. Ignore it. Go on with your lives. There is nothing to see here!

We, as noted, got Hillary Clinton.

A general observation: Lot of lefty weirdness on view at the DNC convention. The final night, of course, the Dems tried to overcome the lack of patriotism manifest throughout the first three nights by flooding the arena with American flags. Didn't work. Poor Leon Panetta, a leftover from the old party which still had some semblance of love of country, found that out. He got hooted for calling for the defeat of the terrorists. That's all you need to know about the modern Democratic Party.

OK, then we had the execrable Chelsea Clinton. I know, I know, the standard wisdom is not to attack candidates' kids. Sorry, but she's an adult, and has put herself out there in the arena, so . . . Is this woman on Xanax? What was that speech-style she adopted? Sounded as if she had received diction lessons from Robbie the Robot or Siri. What a phony. She has vast wealth thanks to her corrupt parents, lives in a $10 million condo in Manhattan--yes, just like other young people--and has a somewhat shady hedge-fund manager husband. She launched a highly scripted and completely inauthentic paean to her corrupt mother, trying to make life in the dysfunctional crime- and scandal-ridden Clinton household seem normal. OK, enough of that.

Hillary's speech. Look, I am biased against her, but have to recognize that she gave a good solid progressive-light speech. Lots of extravagant promises about social justice and inequality and, and . . . it almost made one forget that the Dems have been in power for years and all the problems she outlined have only gotten worse. She had the usual lefty nonsense about guns and racism and, and . . the usual. She seemed to forget that men also exist in America. I noticed her little stunt whereby she altered the standard phrase "Founding Fathers" to just Founders. Constant effort to erase men from American life.

The whole woman schtick is tiresome. Other countries do not make a big deal about this. There have been lots of women politicians and national leaders, some excellent--e.g., Queen Elizabeth, Thatcher, Meir--others disasters--e.g., Ghandi, Merkel, Gillard, Bandaranaike--and most just forgettable or inconsequential--just like most male leaders. This is not a big deal.

I thought her foreign policy stuff was OK. It was standard, inside-the-beltway, American foreign policy prescriptions. Not bad . . . except for one thing, one little thing . . . the person giving the speech. She almost completely ignored her own time as SecState. Her foreign policy was a disaster. I have discussed that disaster in detail many times and won't repeat, but she has an arguably unequaled record of failure. She, of course, did not mention her ambiguous role--at best--in the Benghazi disaster, nor, of course, did she mention her disregard for national secrets. She was a failure with Russia, Latin America, the Middle East, China, terrorism, and, and, and . . . . Not a word about how she and her boss have made the world a much more dangerous place than it was eight years ago.

One has to keep asking Hillary, "When YOU had the power, what did YOU do?" Not much, well at least not much positive for America.

I am going to the gun range. My oldest son is in town and I have promised him a second amendment day.