Watching a Bill Maher rerun. He says "it's 6am in Baghdad right now. So the first people are getting blown up at the polls" and finishes with that insufferable little smirk. Tasteless, sure. A little too satisfied about potential problems with the democratic transition? Sure. But it's Bill Maher, and he's pretty far gone along the "what's bad for the Bush administration is funny to me" path.
More shocking, however, was that after about a second and a half (which is about as long as it took them to get the joke), the crowd erupted in very enthusiastic applause. There's a subtle and ugly dynamic going on here, and it needs a more thorough exposition than we can offer. But at a very basic level, there's something in the way of a guilty conscience: of a mutual pact to wallow in failure and, yes we'll say it, in outright anti-Americanism. This is the expression of a sentiment - a genuine hope for the defeat of democratic hopes in Iraq - that can't be spoken explicitly, but has to be covered over with nervous laughter and justified by the increasingly pedantic and unconvincing insistence that those who find anti-American defeatist unseemly can't take a joke.