True of all political parties. These things are cooked up by wonks who make a career of cooking up stuff with lots of bullet points and impressive rhetoric. In fact, most of the items on a platform are meaningless political gas, and those that aren't are often ignored when the party actually gets in power.

For the record, "political gas" is the sort of statement that's often a few paragraphs long, but boils down to little more than "we will educate all our children" or "we will make sure our nation is secure."

The Republican Party platform for 2004 is 92 pages long, considerably more than the length of the U.S. Constitution and all of its amendments, which already indicates a pretty high "gas" level before we read a word.

A decent conservative/Republican manifesto could probably be written on a single page, if someone was paying attention to principles rather than politics.

The Democratic 2004 platform clocks in at 43 pages, probably because they didn't have to spend so much time kissing an incumbent's butt. Still, most of it is gas, too.