I know that seems like a preposterous question given the hegemony of lefties at the heights of American culture, and that Americans for some odd reason keep voting for Democrats, but the thrashing about by liberal politicians and pundits in this presidential campaign is comical. It is often in the throes of death that an organism exhibits its most extreme behavior, and this presidential election season is revealing quintessential liberal extremism.

We all know the more recent examples, from Mitt Romney being called a felon by an Obama administration spokeswoman, to him being accused of killing a woman from cancer and that he didn’t care, to the hysteria that has greeted the Paul Ryan VP Pick. The latest absurdity comes from the queen of high society liberaldom, the snarky Maureen Dowd. I hate to bring her up again, after just a few posts, but this could simply not pass without comment.

In her NY Times piece yesterday titled, “When Cruelty Is Cute,” referring to who else but Congressman Ryan, she states the following:

I’d been wondering how long it would take Republicans to realize that Paul Ryan is their guy.

He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.

Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?

He’s Scrooge disguised as a Pickwick, an ideologue disguised as a wonk. Not since Ronald Reagan tried to cut the budget by categorizing ketchup and relish as vegetables has the G.O.P. managed to find such an attractive vessel to mask harsh policies with a smiling face.

And she concludes with these winsome sentences:

Ryan should stop being so lovable. People who intend to hurt other people should wipe the smile off their faces.

That is exactly what conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals want to do: hurt other people. Let’s just stop denying it; we love to be cruel; we live to rain misery upon millions. The scary thing is that modern liberals really believe this. We ascribe to them grand intentions, while they ascribe to us as the most malevolent intentions imaginable.

We may have a perfect storm here, similar to the forces that brought the death of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was clear for decades that Soviet communism didn’t work, that life in those societies tyrannized by it was dreary and dangerous and suffocating. As global communications and technology increased, it became harder and harder for Soviet leaders to sell the Potemkin village version of their vile ideology.

After almost four years of Obama, it is clear that it is impossible to sell unalloyed liberalism because it simply doesn’t work. Thus the only chance Democrats have is to demonize and destroy. True, he lied his way to the presidency in 2008 by pretending to be a moderate, but there is not a moderate bone in his body. People with eyes to see knew what kind of person would be a disciple of Saul Alinsky and sit under the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years; everyone else bought the rhetoric of “hope and change.”

Some may remember they did the same to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, but this is different. Obama is a died in the wool progressive who believes that statist left-wing style policies of a European Welfare state will make America a better place. He has tried everything he can to put such policies into place, whether he has had the cooperation of congress or not. As is happening in Europe and California, these policies are simply unsustainable and do not deliver the prosperity Americans demand.

Most average apolitical Americans know it; they’ve seen it. The emperor has no clothes. The man behind the curtain is not the Wizard of Oz; he is an ambitious politician who wants to “fundamentally transform” America, and most Americans don’t want their society “fundamentally transformed”. The hysteria evinced by Democrats and their minions makes me think they just might suspect all of this, and they will double down on the nastiness to try to keep Americans from realizing the truth.