The Whiners in the GOP and The Millennials

All this whinging and whining from the RNC and the GOP contenders about the nasty, “gotcha” questions from the CNBC moderators at last week’s debate raised some interesting thoughts.

First, it’s actually pretty funny when you realize how stupid they sound now. What do these folks think awaits them, should one of them actually end up in the White House? Do they expect Putin to pull his punches? That Iran’s Ayatollah is going to play nice?

Yeah, some of the questions were pretty rough but so what. Hillary was asked whether she’d “do anything to become president” and Bernie was asked if he thought anyone who called themselves “socialist” could ever win the election. Not exactly underhanded tosses. I didn’t hear any bitching from the Dems.

The GOP’s childish response (we’re gonna take our football and go home, nyah, nyah) is hysterical — and has an intriguing parallel with what’s happening on college campuses where efforts are made to ban “trigger” words or restrict speech that makes someone feel uncomfortable.

All this infantile bitching turns on the same ironic point: Both the GOP pretenders and the thin-skinned millennials are the products of irrationally protected environments. The college kids were raised in families that worked so hard to shield their children from unpleasantness that they never learned to deal with that ugly place, The Real World.

The group of Republican candidates are used to being coddled by their best buds, the reporters and talking heads of Fox News. They’ve become accustomed to love-fests with Glenn Beck and make-nice parties with Rushbo. And now they are finding reality to be something of a surprise.

The ribbon of irony that ties things together is that these faux-conservatives hate, absolutely hate, those left-leaning colleges and universities and constantly attack them for infringing on free speech.