Tonight's RNC theme: 'Making America First Again.' Wanna bet this won't mean first where it matters?

I love my country. From sea to shining sea. From the redwood forests to the Gulfstream waters. Truly I do.

Not in that nationalistic, super-patriotic, bloody-minded way that actually extended the country to those supposedly God-ordained boundaries on the Atlantic and Pacific. That was a nasty bit of business that left many trails of tears and bodies, as did much U.S. behavior in the other countries of the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia.  

Not because of the fact that we have more official memorials to the Confederate general who co-founded the Ku Klux Klan than to Abraham Lincoln's partner in winning the Civil War, Frederick Douglass. Quite the message is delivered by that.

Not for the plutocrats, whose rule has ebbed and flowed throughout our history, but now stands at high tide.

What I love is that on every issue of importance throughout our history there have always been people who demand the country live up to its ideals. People who insisted that the-way-things-have-always-been-done wasn't good enough, and relentlessly struggled for something better no matter how long it took, no matter how daunting the risk. People who believed that democracy worthy of the name must always include a steady chipping away at the age-old economic golden rule: He who has the gold, rules. Praise be to these activists.

In that let's-be-all-we-can-be sense, I'm very much a patriot. In matters that matter, I want the United States to be No. 1. Unfortunately, in metric after metric, we aren't No. 1. Not even close. And too few people are asking why the hell that's the case and why aren’t we doing something to correct it.

And when somebody does raise the issue, they don’t typically ask the right questions or focus on the right issues. You can bet that Donald Trump’s campaign slogan for tonight’s Republican National Convention—“Make America First Again”—won’t be making it first where it really matters.