There are two ways I can look at this.

#1: As a partisan hack: the Democratic Party ought just to plargarize the most ironic elements. (And keep the parts from the Democratic Platform that look great in retrospect.)

#2: As a cynic: they will. John Kerry will win in 2004. And in 2008, the Republican backlash to Kerry Interventionalist foreign policy, Intelligence abuses, and civil liberty abuses will have the RNC re-creating the same damned platform yet again. So… the 2000 RNC platform, the 2004 DNC platform, and the 2008 RNC platform will look identical, as we all run around in circles…

William Kristol– leading neo-conservative hawk, spokesperson for the Project for a New American Century, and editor of the Weekly Standard– was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night.

A fascinating interview. Kristol looked dazed, off-kilter, and defeated.

Two weeks of unimaginable bad news undercutting your stance will do that to you.

At one point, this was nearly the exchange:
Stewart: But… how can we re-elect a man who’s driven us into a ditch, you know?
Kristol: Well, he’s driven us into a ditch… well, maybe not a ditch but…
(audience applause)

You will notice, too, that just a few days ago George Will used the word “Empire”, in his forlorn column of disappointment:

David Byrne, from his latest album “Grown Backward”… the song is “Empire”:

In national elections
In songs raised on high
With stirring emotions
As tears fill your eyes

In democratic fever
For national defense
I am a mountain [3x]
Like birds upon a fence [2x]

Young artists and writers
Please heed the call
What’s good for business
Is good for us all

And as it is in Nature
So it is in life
The weak among us with perish [3x]
The strong alone will survive [2x]

Voices like thunder
Decisions like steel
The past and the future
They belong to us all

From every mountain
The water and the air
The world that we’ve created [3x]
By working hand in hand [2x]

Question:
At what point does a truly horrific event enter the popular culture landscape in such a way that it becomes socially acceptable to laugh at it?

The JFK assassination has long since become an easy target for merriment.

I think we’ve passed the point where it’s acceptable to mock school shootings… as long as you’re not actually attending K-12.

Some people have a problem with singing chirpy songs while being bled to death in the same manner as a Messiah figure.

9/11 is probably still a bit too… edgy.

Hitler is tossed around casually enough that Howard Dean and George W. Bush have both been compared to him.

On the market right now is a bizarre deriviation of an certain serial killer that you eat as part of an unbalanced diet.

A few hundred years from now, we’ll be choking on Osamiques. Why Osamiques? Because the cutsey “o” endings to mockowords will fall out of fashion… (Does that mean that the French will enjoy some cultural expansion? Nay… I’m thinking more along the lines of the Quebecers…)

Anyway…

“Let the eagle soar,

Like she’s never soared before.

From rocky coast to golden shore,

Let the mighty eagle soar.

Soar with healing in her wings,

As the land beneath her sings:

‘Only god, no other kings.’

This country’s far too young to die.

We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,

And we can make it if we try.

Built by toils and struggles

God has led us through.”

http://www.cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ashcroft.sings.wbtv.med.html

Cut and pasted from the forum over here. No, I don’t believe in aliens…

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US First Lady Laura Bush says she was deeply saddened by the scandal over US troops’ abuse of Iraq prisoners. Saying the abuses made her “sad, really sad,” the first lady told ABC television: “To be perfectly frank I can’t bear to look at the ones that have been in the newspaper.

“It is really, really sad, I mean, it is sad. I think we — we agonize as each of those pictures come out and as we see them. It is a picture we don’t want the rest of the world to have of us,” she said, adding that she was concerned about US troops safety noting the scandal “makes our troops more vulnerable.”

She said President George W. Bush had been “very anguished” by the affair which has done serious damage to the US image abroad, and especially in the Arab world.

“Those photographs don’t represent America. They don’t represent our troops. And they don’t represent the way people in the United States of America think or act, Laura Bush added. “It is not a fair picture of the United States military”

“When we look at what we have done in Iraq where — you know they have water, they have electricity, schools have been refurbished. I’m working on building a children’s hospital in Iraq,” the US first lady said.

“In Afghanistan, where little girls are in school for the first time in their lives because they have been liberated from the Taliban, I think all of those are the really good things that the United States military and the actions of the United States government have taken. We need to remind the world of that as well,” Laura Bush said.

She insisted however, that there is a silver lining.

“This is the really good news about the United States of America, though. That is the pictures came to light. People will be prosecuted. Unlike under Saddam Hussein , where there were torture rooms and know one knew about them and didn’t come to light,” the US first lady said.
……………..

Remarks excerpted by Mrs. Laura Bush At the National Press Club – November 8, 2001

“The United States is now a “sadder and less innocent” nation …”

“We have felt sadness and anger and fear, yet out of those emotions have risen courage and hope.”

“I’ll say “I’m sad,” and they’ll nod and say they are sad too.”

“For over an hour I believed that it had been hit, and for the people there — people we worship with almost every weekend.”
……………………..