the young kool-aid drinkers gather and worship saint ronnie

A bunch of twenty-something College Republican types gathered recently at the Holy Shrine of Saint Ronnie, aka the California ranch owned by the late and not-so-great Ronald Reagan. It was an annual get-together where all the young conservatives can get together and agree how hard it is to get English-speaking help, how Hillary Clinton is such a bitch, how gays are EVERYWHERE now and it was so much easier when they stayed in the closet and you only had to worry about straight teachers molesting the kids, and how things would be great if the media would just give a conservative like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Robert Novak or anybody at all on Fox News a chance to make his or her voice heard.

And gosh, some of them are disillusioned. I mean, like as one college girl said, none of the GOP candidates for president are perfect like Reagan. The same student, with the impeccably conservative name of "Coolidge", thought Ann Coulter was just nifty - "a strong woman, and she's incredibly intelligent".

Her blinkers about Reagan, who was certainly not perfect and deserves a lot of blame for the shitty situation we are in after 25 years of conservative ascendancy, and Ann Coulter who even many adult Republicans find a tad over-the-top with her gay-bashing, liberal-hating shtick, are simply precious. She and most of the others present have clearly spent too much of their formative years watching Rush Limbaugh and assuming he was a journalist (with the implicit if disappearing idea of being somewhat objective) rather than the hired gun of the Republican Party's chief propaganda arm, Fox News.

But the Kool-Aid is sweet and mommy and daddy either (a) have plenty of money and just HATE paying taxes for wasteful government programs ("daddy says ALL government programs are wasteful except for the farm subsidies which he likes just fine since he grows cotton") or (b) tell her all the time how the Democrats are a bunch of satanistic atheists so you have to vote for the Republicans who claim to be anti-abortion, even though that is the party that closed the mental institute where Uncle Frank used to live ("wonder where Uncle Frank is nowadays") and has slashed the real minimum wage over the past 25 years ("gosh, my paycheck just doesn't go as far as it used to," says Mommy who recently took a second job).

I don't mind them deluding themselves. I just don't like the fact that the conservative movement has imposed so many of its delusions on the rest of us, damaging the fabric of our country and by condoning torture, illegal wiretapping, and the worse-than-Nixonian "if the President does it, it's legal" doctrine of the de facto Bush White House, shredding the Constitution. Not to mention bankrupting us in Iraq and thru tax-cuts for the rich. Sigh.