Approximately two minutes into Mark Warner's keynote speech tonight, I started yelling at the screen. "Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney!" No opposition party has ever handed its rival the groaning buffet table of succulent, corrupted meat and ripe, fraudulent fruit that Dick Cheney's neo-con catastrophe has handed the '08 Democrats and this . . . this . . . cell phone salesman, Warner, is babbling on about how good ideas don't come with "Rs" and "Ds" attached to them.

You, Warner, out there in the Oort Cloud, the rest of us are down here, where the guys you don't want to mention have royally screwed every pooch on the continent.

All that stuff about science. Great. But . . . first rule of show biz, Warner . . . Give the People What They Want. In this case, that means you remind the people—like with a rhetorical bat upside their heads—that Dick Cheney and his marionette, George W., are still conflicted about grade school stuff like friggin' evolution. Likewise, half the Republicans who ran to replace them. Then what you do is trot out every medieval, anti-science plot this crowd has ever hatched, from threatening scientists who dared acknowledge climate change to caving into religious nut bags over stem cell research and on and . . . and on and on. It'd take a while. But you can talk fast.

So Warner thankfully bows out, and who do I hear echoing me? Pat goddam Buchanan. Someone is losing their bearings.

Buchanan, the guy who helped cook up Richard Nixon's Southern strategy—the one that shamelessly exploited the segregationist bigotry the Republicans have been milking for forthy years—was as exasperated as I was. "Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney!" Buchanan was shouting to the great amusement of his MSNBC colleagues and the hyper-partisan crowd watching their tent show live from Denver. (These guys will be in Rice Park next week.)

Even Buchanan couldn't understand how the Democrats could miss a target as massive and fetid as . . . Dick Cheney.

Boiled to its essence, Buchanan told Rachel Maddow, Eugene Robinson, and Norah O'Donnell, this is politics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have a great vision of a future full of green gadgets all made by shiny-faced, hi-tech workers right here in the USA. But a huge part of the game is reminding people what they are against. And when you've got a reservoir of antipathy, disgust, and revulsion at the crooks and boobs who've screwed things up as badly as Cheney and George busting cracks in the dam . . . you open the sluice gates and let if flow. And not just a polite little bit. You let it flood the sleeping villages downstream. It's free TV, you twits. The other guys know how to play this game.

Good God! Where are my meds?

Hillary Clinton rescued the night with a speech that did everything she needed it to do. But then I wasn't buying the talk-for-talk-sake chatter that had either Bill or her throwing some kind of egotistic hissy fit at the podium of the Pepsi Center or in any way failing to play the party game. Say what you will, neither of the Clintons is stupid, and we all know they are intensely focused on husbanding and cultivating their political influence. Hell, they'd shrivel up like the Wicked Witch of the North if they weren't the go-to kids for big-money Democrats. (And I say that as a guy who'd happily vote Bubba for a third term.) Those two have known all along that there is only an upside to their showing whole-hearted, over-the-top, jig-dancing support for Obama. Bubba and all his foundations and initiatives prosper, and Hillary accumulates even more influence for whatever she wants to push in the Senate . . . and any contigency in the future.

Along with asking, "Were you only in this for me?" Hillary laid into McBush to the delight of every pissed-off liberal, Democrat, and Independent watching. It was very good. The people went home happy.

But it wasn't nearly enough. Tomorrow, (Wednesday), on day three, between first Bubba himself and then Joe Biden, who is on board as Obama's Veep as much for his adroit touch with dagger-like rhetoric—"a verb, a noun, and 9/11"—as his foreign policy experience, it should be a sweet night for those of us hungering for the sight of Dick Cheney's gizzard on a plate. (I can wait another few months for the sight of Cheney in an orange jump suit being perp-walked for arraignment.) No one ever needed to tell Bubba or Biden how to put on the show people like Pat Buchanan and I want to see.