Running scared...

...the unexamined-by-the-thought-process Republican frat kids ("I'm a Republican because Mom & Dad are Republicans, and they're Republicans because Gramma and Grand-dad were Republicans, and they were Republicans because...") in my neighborhood, that is. After last night's debacle between Grumpy Grampa Simpson and that "icy mofo" who's going to be our next President (moderated by Tom "Greatest Generation because I was almost part of it" Brokaw), this morning the frat-boys' unkempt and bottle-riddled front lawns are sprouting McCain-Palin signs. They're getting scared--their presumption, engrained for the entire duration of their barely-cognizant "adult" intellectual lives, that Republicans always won because they were the Good People, not like those Bad Brown People, Terrorists, and Dirty F*cking Hippies, is tottering on its foundations. And they are becoming dimly aware that their Grand Old Party of Good People is actually going to lose. And all they got in response is lawn signs (just like all Mom 'n' Dad had to "support the troops" was a magnetic flag decal).

And they're going to lose. If for no other reason than that Grampa Simpson comes across, so clearly, as a mean little man. The nerve of the guy, to rail against "entitlements"! He's run his entire life, ever since dumping his first wife for a pill-addicted heiress, as if entitled. And now he thinks he's entitled to the Presidency. And he can't believe that this slim, young, "untested," articulate, smart, charismatic, eloquent Brown Person is going to defeat him. In the first debate, Grampa wouldn't even look at Obama. In the second, he'd look at him, but the raging contempt he feels came out clear as a bell when he called his fellow Senator "That One."

He sounded like nothing so much as a crotchety senior uncle who can't keep track of the grand-kids names anymore. And every time he dissed Obama, his CNN trend lines plunged.

Best line from the DFH bloggers in the wake of last night? From the Manchester Guardian's (one of the world's great leftist news organizations) Melissa McEwan:

McCain needed to win; he did not. He got owned. Say goodnight, Johnny. It's "President That One" to you.

Say goodnight, Frat-boys. Your world is about to get a lot more confusing and your sense of entitlement is about to topple. And it's about time.