Note to those who described yesterday's events at the Democratic National Committee Rules Panel as "chaos": That wasn't chaos. It was petty whining disguised as concern for democracy. And all you party stalwarts who fret about this summers convention can put away your worry beads: Denver 2008 will not be Chicago 1968 redux. Not even close.

For starters, most of the members of the MC5 are either dead or incapacitated, so there won't be any kick-ass tunes being cranked out from the back of a pickup. But it is true that the Descendents are decamped up in Ft. Collins. And two of the three singers for ALL (the "other" version of the Descendents) recently released country punk albums on Suburban Home, a most excellent Denver label.

Nonetheless, the Descendents don't have a signature moment like "Kick out the jams, motherfucker!" that drove the boys from Detroit to modest fame, although "'merican" remains one of the great ironic deconstructions of American idiot thinking. So I could be wrong about the music. Just not about the riots.

Downtown Denver has a free bus that runs along the 16th Street pedestrian mall. When in town for a family wedding back in 2006, my brothers and I rode it from one end of downtown (where our hotel sat) to the other (where the Wynkoop Brewery sits) and drank our fool heads off. Wynkoop sells pints for $3, and the bartender comped our third round. He got a solid tip.

I hadn't seen $3 pints of good beer since, well, before I could legally drink. And Wynkoop makes good beer. I could see myself hitchhiking to Denver for some good ol' protesting and then getting waylaid at the Wynkoop. And when it's time to leave, you might notice that they sell half-gallon growlers for $10--and that includes the bottle! Fuck protesting, man. There's beer to be drunk!

But readily available good beer is not going to fuel protests. Not this time, anyway. The middle-aged-to-elderly ladies in the Hillary Clinton brigades will not be stopping by the Wynkoop. They remind me of a gang of Carrie Nations, destroying everything in their path as they advance toward their dubious goal. I feel secure in saying that the older Hillary crowd won't be tossing down the brews.

But they're also too repressed to throw a really good protest. The sad little "McCain in 2008" chants they came up with at the meeting yesterday are hardly original and have little basis in reality. The notion that Hillary Clinton would do much better--or worse-- that Barack Obama in the election this fall just isn't borne out by the polls. By and large, Clinton and Obama hold slight leads in national surveys. Once they stop sniping and begin pointing out that McCain seems to believe in an "Iraq: Now and Forever!" policy, the polls they will be a changin'.

Back when my wife graduated from college, she listed "enjoying feminism" as a recreational pursuit on her resume. This bit helped get her a job at the St. Petersburg Times, where it--and her short haircut--was widely interpreted as "I'm a lesbian." Her boss was rather taken aback when she met me at a party, but we split a beer and everything was cool.

My wife deleted that line from her cv a while back, but it still suits her. Like me and plenty of other folks, she believes that there ought to be a woman as president sooner than later. She remains a skeptic about Obama--and Clinton and McCain. As befits the clear-eyed vision of a professional journalist, she believes that America is in too much trouble for any one person to make much of a difference. Nonetheless, twenty years ago she would have been one of the people making their way to Denver to protest for Hillary at the convention. The politics are irrelevant; any protest in support of chickdom is a good protest. And plenty of guys like me who tend to prefer gals who "enjoy feminism" would be along for the ride.

Of course, the guys will end up at the Wynkoop. As they should. After all, they're just there to get laid. The prospect of thousands of passionate women screaming to the ends of their emotions seems awfully promising. If I was in college I'd be there in a heartbeat.

But looking back from my expanding seat of geezer wisdom, I gotta tell these guys: Pick up someone at the bar. Women on an estrogen-fueled mission aren't generally in the mood to be confronted by a penis, even a friendly one. You might get lucky--and if you do, you've hit the jackpot. Transference is a beautiful thing. But you'll do better with gals who drink beer in copious quantities. Truth is, there are just too many ways to blow your shot with a Clintonista. A single "C'mon, Obama ain't that bad" will put you out in the cold.

Losing sucks. And Hillary Clinton lost. As I said months ago, she lost the race back in Iowa by allowing Obama to become a legitimate candidate. If she'd done the hard work on the ground and kept his numbers under 20 percent, she'd be the nominee today. Black people would still love her (and her husband) and John McCain would be looking for his own Tora Bora hideout. But life is funny, and she lost. Now she has to spend the next six months swearing fealty to the guy who beat her. That's how politics works.

And who knows? It's June in an election year. Maybe someone will be crazy enough to...

Jon Worley would be happy to spend a week in Denver in late August, as long as he spent that week at the Wynkoop.