WHINERS. Conservatives are an odd lot. They run the country, and seem at their pep rallies, at least, to know it, high-fiving and lustily proclaiming, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." For a winning team, though, they do a surprising amount of whining.

Yesterday's Supreme Court comments make good examples, but I must share with you this whinge from Keith Burgess-Jackson at the library of rejected thesis drafts known as Tech Central Station:

"...instead of engaging conservatives, liberals seek to crush them. It is as if conservatives are unworthy of being taken seriously. It is as if they are less than human."

Given the power disparity between the two groups, it is as if Burgess-Jackson were accusing cockroaches of plotting to send him to the ovens.

B-J has plenty of shoulders to cry on. One such is James Lileks, the cornpone vendor from Minnesota who amuses us with anecdotes about his widdle girl Gnat and lurid fantasies about Michael Moore's painful, fecally-explicit death. So Lileks likes to play rough -- "Fisking" and all that. But get a load of how he reacts when someone takes a swipe at him:

My God, people can be vile. I hate to realize sometimes how naive I can be, how I can still be surprised at someone’s ability to put the screws to their fellow man -- er, person -- for reasons so petty you couldn’t find them with an electron microscope. One silly minor person sets her jaw, decides to show someone what’s what, and the effect cascades through the lives of half a dozen other people.

But you know what they say: everytime a door closes, another one opens. So make sure when you close it, your tormentor’s foot is caught twixt door and frame. And slam it shut. Hard.

I have no idea what the beef is -- and I suppose it would be unkind, in a Lileksian way, to speculate (so unfair that I just now deleted a mean gag relating to it -- oh, by the way, UPDATE) -- but Jesus, what a whiner.

Now, I whine too. Oh boy, do I whine. But I'm one of those evil, dehumanizing liberals -- it's in character for me to whine. (And to listen to NPR, drive a Volvo, and murder unborn babies.) Lileks, on the other hand, is impeccably right-wing, and has a fine house, a nice family, a cushy gig, a loyal dog. One would expect him to look trouble in the eye with the same amused glimmer that graces the orbs of Rumsfield and Cheney when some idiot appears to expect a straight answer from them. Yet here he is, to borrow an apt phrase from one of Mike Tyson's handlers, jumping around like a little bitch.

Is that what success is like? Thank God I'm a failure!