Plus ça change? Just 38 1/3 years ago, P.J. O'Rourke wrote...

July of 1988 found one of Walt's favourite writers on the American scene in Atlanta, covering the Democratic convention for Rolling Stone. He was listening to Jesse Jackson harangue the honkies, and wrote down these thoughts, which I think can be applied to the Democractic Party [to both parties! Ed.] today.

Listening to Jesse Jackson, something hit me. It wasn't even a good patch of Jackson oratory. He was just yammering on. 

"So many guided missiles and so much unguided leadership... This night we choose not a false sense of independence... Tonight we choose interdependence..." 

I don't even like the guy but all of a sudden I misted up. My nose began to run with patriotic sniffles. Maybe I'd got it all wrong about these hairball conventions. Maybe, as vapid and puerile as American politics are, there's something wonderful about them, after all.

I mean, here was this firebrand, this radical, this leader of an alienated and angry minority. And was he in jail? Was he in exile? Was he dead? No, he was being absorbed whole -- supporters and all -- into the Democratic party, the largest political organization in the US.

It's sort of heartwarming. America can co-opt anything, make anything insipid. No politician is too weird to withstand our national blandness. Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah.

So what if I don't agree with the Democrats? What's to disagree with? They believe everything, and so do the Republicans. And neither of them stand for anything they believe in anyway. And you know something? It works.

Maybe our Disney World mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those sneaky little European countries, filled with Commies and Nazis and creepy-looking Greens. Why not have political conventions without politics to nominate leaders who are out in front of nobody?

Maybe the American political system isn't like a Mexican Christmas fiesta, with something inside the piñata filled with full employment, low interest rates, comprehensive medical benefits, free day care, a balanced budget and other goodies.

Maybe it's more like a Big Mac. It's mushy and tasteless and made out of disgusting parts of things. But when you come right down to it, everybody wants one

Anyone can be co-opted. Anyone can be swallowed whole by the system. Now that Abdul Ed-Sayed is the Senator-elect from Michigan, just watch how quickly he backs away from the Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia Law and the rest of the Islamist BS that got him elected by fellow Muslims from Dearborn. He is now changing into his President of Arab America suit. Walt predicts that two years from now he'll lose the "Arab" part. Lifetime pct .987.