WINGNUTS: THEY'RE ALL SPOILED-BRAT FAILURES NOW

Has this been true all along and I missed it, or has all of George W. Bush's wingnut base actually turned into George W. Bush?

Think about it. Bush has screwed up everything he's ever done in his life, yet he retains a massive sense of entitlement, and he seems to regard many aspects of reality (the failure of his big war, the plain text of laws passed by Congress, the Constitution) as personal affronts to his ego that he's free to accept or reject.

The wingnuts have also screwed up spectacularly, fobbing off the spectacularly incompetent and unpopular Bush on America, and yet they feel entitled to deny the cold truth that non-wingnuts in their party, and non-Republicans with the full legal right to vote in their primaries, have made John McCain the party's nominee.

At this point the analogy breaks down somewhat: Bush is still president, so he retains the godlike ability to sustain his destructive, reality-denying misrule at will. The wingnuts can't simply nullify the results of their party's primaries and caucuses -- as far as we know -- but they're refusing to accept the 99% of a loaf they've got in John McCain; the latest is that Glenn Beck is derisively calling the presumptive nominee "Juan McCain" and Ann Coulter is saying, "I will campaign for [Hillary Clinton] if it's McCain."

And all this when the clouds were parting on the Democratic side during last night's love fest, at least temporarily, and it was possible even for your grumpy correspondent to feel what a lot of people felt a couple of months ago -- that, whoever wins, we're happy, and let's just pick one of the solid candidates (and maybe even the dream ticket) and come together and finish off the Republicans.

Just about everything has gone the wingnuts' way for close to thirty years. In that time we've had a few glimmers of hope and a few more false dawns. The result is that they're brats who demand everything they want, all the time. We're not like that. And right now, that makes us seem like the grown-ups, and maybe it means we'll win one.