The cultural reference in the title? The explanation is that once upon a time, boys wore shorts until a Certain Age, at which they were considered mature enough (not sure what age that was) to wear long pants, as befitting arrival at Man’s Estate. I’m guessing 16 or so, the common school leaving age Back In The Day.
The estimable Lance Mannion weighs in on the Depends-wearing militia:
Lance Mannion: A rhetoric of cowardice and vanity:
Right Wing bloggers have felt a duty to scare the beejeebers out of the rest of us. Now, a lot of them were quaking in their boots themselves and were desperate to prove that their own terror ought to be shared by all of America. And a lot of them have managed to scare themselves, like Cub Scouts telling ghost stories around a camp fire.
But I think all of them, just like the Cub Scouts, enjoy being scared.
They enjoy it because after they’re done giving themselves goose bumps, they get to defy their own fear. They get to be brave.
They can scare themselves silly and then immediately start swaggering around as they’ve just walked up to a fe-fi-foing, grinding Englishman’s bones to make his bread giant and spit in his eye.
To live in fear as if the possibility of another terrorist attack is the same as living under the hourly threat of one is a mark of cowardice.
But to say from the comfort of your radio studio back here in the United States to someone who is in Iraq at that very moment, essentially, “Hey, bub, don’t talk to me about danger! I’m the one knows from danger! I got your security problems right here!” isn’t just cowardice.
It’s conceit.
I never got into the “let’s go see a movie so we can wet ourselves” idea of fun: apparently some never grow out of it.
And I wish this were real: gotta be a spoof, but funny all the same.