LOS ANGELES — After two days of the convention, there is absolutely nothing new to report. The weather is so horrible even the dumbest protesters and meanest cops can't get a show together for the visiting media. The speeches are delivered to the press hours before the actual speaker reads the text, the various disabled and minority Democrats are mostly condemned to the empty afternoon sessions, and there is a general feeling that Al Gore may just have this nomination wrapped up.

At this point, as many media writers have already opined, the only smart thing to do is go home or back to the air-conditioned hotel, uncork the wine and get the remote control and laptop ready for work. This is a teevee show, after all, and only the dumb and the determined insist on watching it anywhere else — like, where it actually happens.

Wednesday morning, this was my attitude, but my comrade Tim Blair — famed and despised Australian political reporter — arrived on assignment and needed to examine the American political process. We took the Metro downtown, had a hotel-diner lunch, and entered the Scripted Horror of the Democratic National Convention. Blair had been on a plane for 14 hours and was suffering severe jet lag and heat stroke (it's winter in Sydney). Now, we shall discuss what happened, what it means, and why it doesn't matter:

Blair: Gore Vidal once blamed Harry Truman's imbecile electioneering smile for forever destroying the dignity of American political campaigning. Vidal was wrong; Harry's maniac grin didn't influence Eisenhower's grim stare, nor Nixon's chilling, thin-lipped glower. On Wednesday, the demented smile has all but vanished. American politics is now threatened by the Clinton lip-bite.

Bill's practiced look of childlike contrition or wonderment (depending on the issue being addressed) was echoed Wednesday by Hadassah Lieberman, who employed the lip-bite at least twice during a speech of such spun-sugar sickliness I felt I would vomit. It made me crave the wide-eyed, looking-at-nobody-but-smiling-crazily-all-the-while expression sometimes favored by Hillary Clinton. Truly, she is the inheritor of Truman's toothy legacy.

Layne: Once we entered the "perimeter gate" and made the 7-mile hike to DNC media headquarters, Blair and I went straight to the lounge to get some wisdom and cool beverages from the maniac bartender Ralph. The beer was barely in the glass when NYT CyberTimes writer Rebecca Fairley Raney stepped up and declared, "Ken, you're the only reporter here who can always be found at the bar."

I took this as a compliment. We finished our Heinekens and headed to Desolation Row, where the USC-Annenberg video team awaited our informed participation in the daily webcast Unconventional Wisdom. Blair, having spent all of six hours on American soil at this point, was enlisted to provide an international-journalist viewpoint to the circus. Being a serious political man, he did fine, although I screwed up everything by laughing inappropriately. But webcasts are like Kleenex: generally seen and used by a single person.

We headed up to the Staples skybox, where I quickly unfolded my portable keyboard and began typing nonsense into the Palm Pilot. Blair was horrified by a disabled kid they rolled onto the stage: the kid spoke through a Stephen Hawking-voicebox thing, but nobody could understand the strange robot sound. To the right of the child, a sign-language interpreter made yet another translation. Blair was astounded: a double-disability convention-pandering spectacular. This hasn't yet been attempted down under.

I couldn't concentrate, because I'd seen a xeroxed poster advising the media that Sam Donaldson of ABCnews.com would be interviewing a rock. It seemed the perfect conclusion to Internet/teevee journalism, only to be topped by my webcast interview of some dirt, but later I learned the rock in question is a wrestling character recently used as an announcer at the Republican convention to project ... something.

Blair: Confused and upset by the tragic palsy boy, I was soon elevated by the helium-weighted speech of would-be VP Joseph Lieberman. Shorn of cant, pieties, and nonsense, here is the essential information Mr. Lieberman conveyed:

America is great. I am a vice-presidential candidate.

I thank my wife. Thanks.

I am proud. I will help Al Gore become president.

There must be room for everybody at America's table.

Different religions are different.

But people can still get along.

Dad did it tough. I went to college. Mom is still alive.

I protested many things as a younger man.

American GIs saved my wife's family from being killed.

There is residual discrimination in America. This is bad.

Some Republicans are OK guys.

Texas stinks.

Al Gore wants clean water and no pollution.

Health is important. Republicans don't understand this.

Education is important. Republicans don't understand this.

Republicans want to give tax cuts to the upper classes.

Us Democrats want to give tax cuts to the middle classes.

Al Gore is good.

I know Al Gore very well. My daughter likes Al, too.

Al Gore is brave.

Al and Tipper Gore don't like dirty lyrics in popular song.

Hooray for Al! Make him president.

JFK was good.

40 years from now, another version of me will deliver a similar speech.

America is uniquely great.

Layne: What should be considered here is that Blair and I had spent the previous two hours on the streets, where a riot was planned but failed due to the total blubbering idiocy of the demonstrators. The entire protest worked like this: people from the anti-cop rally had marched into the intersection where Figueroa meets Staples. They split into factions (roughly, two factions per person). A random guy would demand everyone take 10 steps back, while those around him would loudly demand he shut up. Some photographers were hassled by suddenly media-unfriendly "anarchists," who crudely said this wasn't a media event. Of course, these protesters had traveled to the DNC specifically because it was a media event.

We found Welch, who had followed the march and was close to sunstroke, and stood around smoking while the cops rather politely told the punks to clear out in 15 minutes. Of course, the announcer cop read his military watch and said the police would clear the intersection at "18:10," which confused most of the kids. Then he said it was 5 p.m., which it wasn't. Welch bellowed, "It's 6 o'clock."

To his credit, the police announcer said, "Correction: it's 6 p.m."

Standing within a DNC protest is like standing in line for a Disneyland ride, but you never get to the fun part. Eventually the protesters — save for the God protesters who were busy calling everyone a "faggot" —- headed back up Figueroa and took their march someplace else. Only the hot-dog and Gatorade vendors were nonplussed. They did good business the whole time, and not a single anarchist confronted the capitalist Latino vendors for supplying food and drink.

Blair: Kids will be kids. Just as warnings were issued of imminent rubber bullets and choking gas, a young female protester complained to a friend: "He's just so into himself. He thinks he's the most important person in the world." This collision of Beverly Hills 90210 with Prague 1968 didn't seem at all jarring; after all, most of the downtrodden, oppressed anarchists present were abundantly well-fed and expensively decorated. You can find greater evidence of working-class suffering in Monaco, for Christ's sake.

Speaking of which, Al Gore his bad self barged onto the stage to bring his daughter's odd speech to a close. The gist of her remarks was that, if you crave an igloo-maker in the White House, funster Al is your man. People — some of them in the press boxes — applauded Al's unscheduled appearance, much as Dr. Frankenstein thrilled to the animation of his monster.