I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few days: Harry Reid’s speech at the Democratic convention.
The speech landed like a lead balloon. Even at the top of his form, Reid can be a dull speech-maker, and he wasn’t at the top of his form when he made this address. The audience mostly ignored him as he came on stage, and I was looking ahead to bigger speeches later in the night.
And then he started his speech with this: “The history of the last hundred years has been a toxic mix of oil and war.”
That got my attention. Apparently I wasn’t the only person to notice that so may war hotspots are also oil hotspots.
“Wars were funded by, impossible without, and usually fought over oil. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazi invasion of Russia, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and countless other conflicts have been based in whole or in part on the world’s addiction to oil,” he droned on. “Even today, dictators and authoritarians from Venezuela to Russia, from Sudan to North Korea, base their actions — and their power to oppress their citizens and threaten their neighbors — solely on access to or sale of oil on the world market.”
“If we continue to follow this slippery, oil-slicked, downward-winding path, our citizens will shiver in darkness as our resources hemorrhage to Third World thugs whose only virtue is their control of petroleum-based energy,” he continued.
And there was this: “For the 28 years since 1980, except for the Clinton presidency, former oil industry executives have been president or vice president of the United States — and indeed, for the past eight years, have filled both offices at once.”
He then moved on to the expected partisan lines: Obama can solve the problem, McCain can’t, etc., etc., etc., and he was met mostly by audience indifference. He wrapped up and got off the stage to the very definition of “a smattering” of applause.
There’s a speech like this at nearly every convention — a speech where someone makes an important point, perhaps not very eloquently, and everybody glosses right by the thing. I think this speech is worth your attention, though. Here’s a transcript.
