You're killing us, Mark

The AP is reporting that Mark Warner "plans to offer a lesson in Virginia-style bipartisanship" in his keynote address tonight.

"There may be parts of the speech that aren't going to get a lot of applause," Warner said Monday, "but I've got to say what I believe will get our country back on the right path."...

Fuck Mark Warner and his lesson in bipartisanship. He's absolutely killing Gilmore in his senate race. You could say that means he knows how to appeal to Republicans, and that's true enough. But it also means there's no reason he can't do something useful like use his keynote speech to hammer John McCain.

I have no idea why the people of Virginia are so taken with this schmuck. He looked like he was kinda sorta going to run in 2004, courting the Netroots with chocolate ice sculptures or whatever, then went back into the woodwork. He doesn't seem to have any qualities other than bland red state placeholder Democrat, and clearly he doesn't want to get caught saying anything disparaging about John McCain.

It would be nice if there could be a convention where, if only for a few days, the party stops putting the blue dogs and the necessary evils like Warner front and center, and tells them to just sit there quietly while actual Democrats do the talking.

But maybe I've got him all wrong and he'll do a great job tonight. Color me skeptical.

Update:
Awful. Not about liberal versus conservative. It's about the past versus the future. Blah blah blah. Nothing about Obama in particular, except insofar as he occasionally began a segment "Barack Obama believes that..." Virtually no mention of John McCain. Completely fucking useless and self-serving.

Rachel Maddow was apoplectic in the post-speech commentary, as was Pat Buchanan. Eugene Robinson wondered why no one at the Democratic convention was using words like "Iraq" and "torture."

Much love to Bob Casey Jr. for his "That's not a maverick, it's a sidekick" line in reference to McCain's 90% Bush-friendly voting record.