At the Battle of Mandalay Bay...

...every Puffalump Pig will get an extra special Blue Battle Ribbon with Chickenhawk Wingnut Clusters.

Have you every wondered – in that, “Where the hell did Paper Lace go?” kinda way – whatever happened to the graduates of every unearned Self Esteem Class from the 80’s? The kids who got the equivalent of extra super special Presidential Blue Ribbons of Freedom just for being thermal mass or successfully converting oxygen into carbon dioxide with each and every extra special breath they took.

If they lived Life as it is lived most places – paycheck-to-paycheck and one busted, bread-earner leg away from disaster – they tended to sober up from that Big Rock Candy Mountain silliness pretty quick.

However, if they were to The Manor Born, turns out that it left them without a functional immune system.

It turns out that, during the night, during Young Master’s untroubled dreams of their future lives of Unfettered Privilege and unearned “accomplishments", oviraptors of the American Dream like Grover Nordquist and Tom DeLay crawled into their ears, stole their souls and laid a clutch of maggoty slogans into the moral cavity the theft created.

These are the children of the Mommies who swooped down on Principal’s Office like an avenging Gorgon, threatening lawsuits and worse if little Nathan’s “C” wasn’t fucking well changed to an “A” right now.

Little Nathan’s going to go Yale, dontch’a know.

These are the children whose parent taught them to shriek, “I pay your salary!” at every cop who might dare to ticket them for speeding.

These are the children who were taught the names of Daddy’s solicitors before they were out of training pants.

These are the indignant, indolent, ignorant children who really were taught that with world does, in fact, own them a living. And a very comfortable living at that.

Taught that poor people are just lazy. That Liberals are traitors. That there is no Greater Good and Glory than a sweeeeet Estate Tax Cut. And that soldiers are basically like the gardeners or the maids or the pool guy; humble peons doing what Jesus put them on this Earth to do. Servicing the Young Master and deserving of a patronizing sliver of respect...just so long as they keep their fucking mouth’s shut and do as they’re told.

Because Young Master pays their salaries, so he should by right be able to work them until they collapse if he wants to. Work them to death, should it come to that.

And, finally, that is what Iraq has given everyone on the Right.

Something that the Real World has deprived them of for generations

It's given everyone on the Right -- rich or poor - one more chance to embrace their inner Slaveholder. It gives everyone on the Right – including Young Master – a little taste of the sick, sadist pleasure that they could once only dream of in their deepest, drunkest Red State stupors: a chance to work the peons to death.

To feel once again that power that their great-granddaddies once reveled in: that glorious, murderous sense of absolute entitlement to send other’s to their deaths.

To feel like fucking Gods.

I mean, what right does anyone have to complain if they’re wasting the serfs in their thousands and mutilating them in their tens of thousands in an illegal war, based a deliberate campaign of Republican lies?

Fuck ‘em. We pay their salaries! They volunteered! And if they “volunteered” because that was the only way left to them to lift themselves out of poverty and into the rapidly melting Middle Class...well too fucking bad!

Shoulda had Daddy’s lawyer read the fine print!

If you look over at certain Young GOP Wingnuts For Bush sites, it's gettin' weird. Especially those brave, brave trustifarians who will be fighting, virtually and in-person, the Battle of Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas in a few days Fighting like coked-up otters to see who can ram their soft, moon heads the furthest up Dick Cheney’s ass, while simultaneously denouncing All Liberals Everywhere for no specific reason but cult-reflex as Traitors – they are getting more and more unhinged.

As Operation Yellow Elephant does it’s merry work (and I’m assuming some Patriot with a digital camera will be letting Vegas Army Recruiters know that they are about to become a Very Target Rich environment indeed) the ferocity and nonsensical idiocy of the Young GOP Wingnut seems to be reaching a lively boil.

On one of the more recently-infamous Warblogger site, (Thanks again, Jesus's General) deep in the commentary, fighting a Heroic Rear Guard Action against the hundreds of evil Liberals who insist on rubbing their moon faces in Evil Truth, we are being told that:

We’re all pot-smoking Frenchies. Seriously, for all the good Heritage gelt that gets pumped into the bellies of these cowards to keep them propped up and comfortably dumb, that’s the best these little douchebags have. Stranded one forensic tier below the "I know you are but what am I" defense, this is the leading intellectual edge of the ethically-corpulent swine that plan to Rule The Earth.

Then, of course, there's the amazing arguement that opposing the illegal war in Iraq and making a Big Carping Deal over the fact that their President and His Men repeatedly and egregiously lied us into it is, in fact, simple pique over Bush winning two terms. Which is laughable enough, but shows how horrifyingly, morally dead these termites in the House of Lincoln are.

That, “If Gore had won in 2000 and been re-elected in 2004, and if he had said and done everything that Bush has said and done since Jan. 2001, these same people would be supporting him for the exact same things they are angry with Bush about now.”

No, if President Gore’s first priority had been tax-cuts for billionaires to the point of bankrupting the Government, I’d have opposed him. If his second priority had been to Rape the environment by throwing Science down the stairs, I’d have demanded his resignation. If this third and most important priority had been to launch an optional and illegal war based on lies that he and his cabinet has decided to djinn up years before...I would have demanded his impeachment.

That would be the difference between “Principal” (the hireling your Mommy hectored to get you the marks you never earned) and “Principle”.

Shoulda studied harder, mon petit veal chop.

Then on to the obligatory Liberal Bashing : “These liberals have no core beliefs, just blind partisianship, hatred for conservatives, and hatred for the United Staes of America. They once had the govenment in their control and the media in this country delivering their talking points on a daily basis.”

Wow. If anyone has a purer and more disturbing example of the People of the Lie -- the wild outward projection of one's own deeply ingrained debasement and corruption followed immediately by berserk attacks on the imaginary external enemy -- I'd love to hear it.

And it's funny, because here I thought that when a Party Had a Mandate, every single harebrained idea that runs down their leg have is de facto Holy Writ? That every single thing the say and do is, by definition, the Absolute and Inerrant Truth because the Vox Populi is the fucking Vox Dei, right?

So weren’t by definition, the Democrats 100% Perfectly Right about every single thing they ever said and did while they were in the majority?

We are then told that, “you have this silly notion that your POV is something that should be listened to and that you're a citizen too and deserve to be heard, yadda, yadda, yadda. That's nice and all, but we're really not interested in your visions of how you like to view yourself and the world around you. We're already in the real world and recognize just how insignificant you are, so the only point of having you around is as entertainment. If you aren't being entertaining, then there's really no reason for you to be around at all.”

Typical fascist Eliminationist drivel. Put ‘em in camps. Curb stomp ‘em. Make ‘em dance. As with most cowardly, impotent little brownshirters, they’re all about the Big Talk. The valor of the lemming. The courage of the anonymous mob.

It goes on like that at sloppy, keening length. Squealing contempt for every principle that America is supposed to stand for, a massive and pig-dumb-proud-ignorance of anything that happened last week (we Liberals “need to get some new material.”), wrapped up in a creepy/fake, tissue-thin, saccharine concern for the troops.

Then comes the new meme.

Finally!

We’ve been waiting for it. Fresh from the Mellon Scaife Factory Floor comes the newest, most desperate, most morally bereft talking point yet: That "Humans shields are needed to stop this war. Hop to it." It started running like a rash, so look at it at remaindered prices being flogged at a Hate Site near you.

So...shield between who and who, exactly?

When the military can’t pick out the suicide-bomber from the recruits, which two people am I supposed to interpose myself between?

And funny, I don’t remember anyone anywhere – from the C-n-C to the grunts on the ground – militating for a bunch of untrained civilians to fly in and wander the war zone. Unless you’re referring to the USO...which does seem to be positively thick with evil liberals these days.

The idea is actually so painfully, prima facia absurd that it no more merits “refutation” than does Flat Earthery. It is kinda funny to see what happens when the malformed little homunculi who live inside the Fart Rebreathing GOP Bell Jar try to catapult their house-organ lunacy into the outside world.

Such remarks do have the salutary effect of accidentally setting off a million-candle-power magnesium flare smack in the middle of their own camp. Suddenly, bright as day, you can clearly see what squirmy little monsters they are. You can really do little but shake your head in sad wonder that what once may have been considered the Best and the Brightest are now such craven, lumpen fucktards.

OTOH, since they mentioned it...what I do hear the military asking for – practically BEGGING for – are new recruits. Your Brave New War is ruining the military, and they need men and women answer the call.

It’s your call, Young Republicans.

It’s your war.

You won! Yay! So now back up that fancy Supremacist rhetoric – that fearless, curb stompin’, round ‘em up chatter – with the only action that counts.

The Young Republican Vegas Circle Jerk will never make the history books.

It will be recorded on no Roll's of Honor.

When your children ask you, “What did you do in the Great Iraqi War, Daddy”, telling little Nathan III that you were keg-tapper First Class in the Battle of Mandalay Bay is an answer that will only shame you.

Unless you’re planning on raising up another generation of Yellow Elephants.

Which, considering how your parents raised you, seems quite likely.