I regret the fact that I am not an anthropologist.

I also regret not being a Major League baseball player making a gazillion dollars a year with women hanging all over me and my name on the lips of every kid in America. But given my rather indifferent academic achievements, I would probably have as much chance of playing for my beloved White Sox as I would being employed as an observer of the cultural phenomenon that is modern American liberalism.

In a word, astonishing. R. Emmett Tyrell believes that liberals are the neediest human beings on the planet and, judging by the explosion of emotion and outrage on the left generated by the Libby pardon and other recent events, who would doubt him? This cloying need for high drama in their lives – a dramatic narrative that has them riding to the rescue to save America either from itself or, in this case, George Bush – is tinged with a breath of hysteria:

Time is running out! America is being destroyed! Our Freedoms are Vanishing!

Won’t someone DO something?

Like Cecil, the seasick sea serpent, whose stirring battle cry “I’m comin’ Beanie Boy!” split the airwaves every Saturday morning for my generation, so too liberals propose on riding to the rescue of the American people, saving the Republic by impeaching both the President and Vice President of the United States, and restoring peace and justice to the galaxy, rescuing the rest of us ordinary folk from the evil Sith Lords who hoodwinked more than 60 million people into voting for them in a free and fair election less than 3 years ago.

The fact that the presidency would then devolve to liberal Democrat, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, is entirely coincidental and has no bearing on whether the elected executive branch of the federal government should be decapitated and 2004 election annulled like a Kennedy marriage. How dare you even think that a liberal would do anything so base and…and…common! Allowing partisan considerations to enter into such an extraordinarily serious matter is something only Rethuglicans and those evil Neocons do. Those blessed with the superior moral vision to see the shining path leading to American redemption that can be found in impeachment are not concerned with such ordinary trivialities such as whether a Democrat sits in the White House.

Phooey! If this over the top drama were taking place in some other countries that liberals admire, John Conyers wouldn’t be making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows coyly hinting at overturning an election. He’d be lined up against a wall behind one of those superior medical clinics in Havana. And liberal bloggers wouldn’t be writing hysterical treatises on how close we are to rack and ruin. They’d be disappeared faster than you can say “Hugo Chavez.”

This in and of itself gives the lie to the left’s wildly exaggerated claims that the United States is slipping into some kind of putative dictatorship. If we were, they’d never get the chance to make the claim in the first place.

But this kind of logic seems to escape those whose paranoid, overwrought, frenzied rhetoric about a myriad of conspiracies to steal American liberty has gotten so out of control that reading some of their breathlessly juvenile scribblings, one is torn between tearing your hair out in frustration that anyone could be so idiotic or falling to the floor and rolling around, laughing your ass off:

Come home America, come home.

It is time to come home from distant wars against fictions and phantoms. It is time to come home to your wives how (sic) miss you, to your children who need you, to your families that feel the pain of missing souls.

It is time to come home America, home to the cities that have been flooded, the forests left untended, the fields left untilled. It is time to come home America, to the work left undone, the minds left unschooled. It is time to come America, to the home you did not leave behind, because no home ever lasts if left unrepaired.

And how about this drama queen:

It’s not that we don’t know enough to be enraged. We know too much. About too many things. Our rage is splintered, spread too thin to be effective. For the past five years, people in this country and around the world have protested against Bush and Cheney’s genocidal assault on two helpless nations. As they prepare openly for yet another bloody attack on yet another nation, we continue to sign petitions, hold meetings, march against the corporate machine—all to no avail.

The issues catapaulting citizens into the streets are outrageous—each one deserving of a “million man march” on its own merits. However, because we are frustrated by a relentless media blackout and by the deepening corruption, loss of freedoms and the tightening noose of tyranny, our cries are little more than a cacophony of discord—an impotent racket.

“Cacophony” indeed!

And lest you think hyperbole is the exclusive province of obscure, lefty bloggers, how about this gem from Firedoglake:

This week, a cowardly President who resembles more the King George the colonists revolted against than any of the courageous patriots who signed the Declaration of Independence signed another document, freeing a convicted felon, a crony, from the justice peers found he richly deserved, again trampling on the rule of law. Yesterday, his spokesman insulted the intelligence of reporters and the American people by trying to justify this cowardly act. But in the process, Tony Snow let slip a tidbit that may just be the string that unravels a huge criminal conspiracy

Just what has changed in the America that has caused this sudden upsurge in hyperbole? The more desperate the situation in America – the more dire the circumstances, the more heroic liberals will see themselves when they save the day by impeaching Bush and Cheney. It’s that simple.

Michelle Malkin points out that on numerous occasions prior to the election, the Democrats swore on a stack of bibles – or, given the left’s jaundiced view of religion, maybe on a pile of palm fronds – that come what may, they wouldn’t initiate impeachment proceedings against the President.

This was an extremely useful lie in that it kept enough of Bush’s conservative base at home on election day to allow the the Democratic party to pick up a dozen or more seats by the hair of Hillary’s chinny chin-chin. The way that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi sat on John Conyers and his little impeachment flea circus was deft politics in that the only thing that would have energized conservatives in 2006 was the prospect of Conyers trotting out his truther brigade in order to go over exactly the same ground examined by two Congressional Committees, an in house Pentagon probe (no link), the 9/11 Commission, and the Butler Commission in Great Britain. Reams and reams of paper all saying the same thing; you’re a loon if you believe in some kind of grand “criminal conspiracy.

This won’t stop Conyers. Nor will it stop the netnuts who are ultimately driving this impeachment bandwagon. Whether Republicans care enough about this President to get in their way is an open question.

My prediction? Better install a tampax dispenser in the Oval Office bathroom.