Greetings from Denver. Just got back from the Pepsi Center, which, even more than past convention sites, seems like a really big television facility with a studio audience. The whole graphic structure behind the podium is impressive, although the Democrats have chosen the loose evocation of a flag — flowing red stripes with the occasional floating star — over images of the actual flag. You might call it flagginess, except that’s a different word altogether. Anyway, it all looks kind of patriotic without being too martial or anything.

I was on a plane when Obama and Biden appeared today, but reading their remarks, I was struck by this seemingly nondescript part of Obama’s speech:

[Biden] looked Slobodan Milosevic in the eye and called him a war criminal, and then helped shape policies that would end the killing in the Balkans and bring him to justice.

The reason it struck me was that in an interview in July 2007, when the Democrats held a debate at the Citadel in Charleston, Biden brought up his meeting with Milosevic as an example of Obama’s naivete. Obama had just made his infamous pledge to meet with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, et al, and Biden was in the Spin Room afterward, telling me that Obama just didn’t know how things work. “World leaders should not meet with other world leaders unless they know what the agenda is, so you don’t end up being used,” Biden said. “When I went to meet with Milosevic before the war, the condition I met with him was that no press would be available, I’d only meet him in his office late at night, and I wouldn’t dignify being seen with him.” The whole point was that Obama didn’t have the experience to handle things like that.