Our great national political conventions are finally over and now the news media must get back to talking to themselves without free food and drink at the CNN Grill.
What have we learned? First, the GOP escaped Tampa without Chris Christie eating Delaware. Had he done so, Clint Eastwood's YouTube hits would have registered well under 500 billion. But either way no one other than Mitt Romney's private pilot knew he was actually there.
The Democrats met in something called Charlotte, which is actually Atlanta for clueless Priceline shoppers. There we heard the first lady and Bill Clinton. Beyond that, we don't remember. Except for when Joe Biden burst on stage shirtless in pirate garb swallowing torches of fire.
Oh but wait, yes the President did show up to re-enact the killing of bin Laden with a Power Point presentation of heavily edited Road Runner cartoons. Then Joe Biden ruined the moment by crashing the stage in a vintage Pontiac and soiled tank top, spitting tobacco chew on a Romney-Ryan poster.
Taxpayers expressed delight that their $136 million in combined contributions to these conventions were so well spent. Except for the Democrats denying us balloons on their closing night. Apparently balloons in North Carolina, like hotel rooms and zoo animals, are non-union. So the money was instead funneled to confetti factories reportedly controlled by Cleveland mobsters with ties to Solyndra.
Still, the conventions served their purpose: Waiting for pollsters to tell us if there was a "bounce," which almost never happens unless we trap the candidates in zero-gravity wind tunnels. Even then the experts are likely to say, "Look, there goes a squirrel."
And before you know it, the debates are upon us, we forget the conventions ever happened and after that we forget the debates ever happened. Thankfully then, Election Day is soon over and we can move on to the nation's more important business of speculating about 2016 candidates and booking convention hotel rooms with the fewest reported sightings of bed bugs.