Distracted by Life: I've been distracted from blogging these past couple of weeks by the non-medical news. I've been voting in Presidential elections for twenty-four years now, and I've got to say, those Republicans put together a good convention this year. I'm not normally a political junky. In the past, I might have caught a few speeches here and there on television, but this year the networks (we don't have cable in the Medpundit household) ran the convention so late at night that I would only hear snippets on awakening to NPR's Morning Edition. But what snippets they were - Giuliani, McCain, Schwarzenegger, Zell Miller, and even Dick Cheney. Those morning NPR snippets were so tantalizing, I ended up listening to the speeches in full during lunch while finishing the morning's paperwork. It's the first time that I've felt compelled to look up political speeches that I only read about in the paper or heard in brief on the radio.

The Democratic convention speeches didn't have the same effect, even though they were also the first things I heard in the morning during their convention. Nothing new there (with the exception Barak Obama.) "Two Americas," "Hope is on the Way," Teddy Kennedy, Jimmy Carter - the message hasn't changed in the twenty-four years I've been listening. The American people are downtrodden and only the Democrats can save them. As far as I could tell, there were only passing references to the War on Terrorism, certainly nothing that would make it into those morning snippets on NPR.

And that's the problem right there, with the Democratic Party this time around. Three years ago this month, our country got a wake up call from the Islamic world. The Republicans heard it. The Democrats didn't.

Full Disclosure: I'm listed as a registered Republican, but only because I had to declare myself in the 2000 election to vote for John McCain in the primaries. This may come as a surprise to some people, but there have been only two Presidential elections in which I've voted Republican - in 1988 for George H.W. Bush, and in 2000 for George W. Bush. This will most certainly be my third.