Libs have themselves another Cheney freakout — only this time it’s Liz:

At Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff pawed through the adjective bin and came up with a handful, calling her “pernicious” and “venomous,” and that was just the beginning. She was also “sour, wounded, aggrieved, graceless, paranoid … self-pitying, doubtless, extreme, aggressive and defensive, she might literally kill you and your kind if she could.”

On the other hand, MSNBC”s Chris Matthews, while calling her a “front” for Bill Kristol, found her enchanting. “A very delightful young woman,” he said on his program. “She’s great. You can chat with her … nothing strange about her at all.”

This freaked out Michelle Cottle, alarmed at this and at an another appearance on “Morning Joe,” where the interviewers talked as if she and her father were real human beings, the sin of all sins on the left.

“Gag,” she wrote on the Plank blog at The New Republic’s web site, and advised them to find the “right blend of non-brutish ruthlessness” to eviscerate her without seeming to do so. “Liz Cheney is a particularly dangerous combination of sweet-as-sugar looks and savage instincts,” she warned.

“Going at her roughly and directly as she does her opponents could backfire. But cutting her any slack — or sitting by as media types coo, gurgle, and make…goo-goo eyes at her is a good way to wind up stuck in the undercarriage of her SUV.”

Actually, there is a real way to refute her, but it seems to be hard to deploy. It’s to say politely, “Your ideas are mistaken,” and then calmly explain how and why. In practice, however, this hasn’t worked out.

Well, no, it hasn’t. And here’s why — the root problem with progressivism all tied up with a pretty little bow: it can’t work out, and therefore they not only won’t do it, it’s simply impossible. They will always, always, always rely instead on the smear, the personal attack, the ad hominem, the outright lie.

Liberal ideas have been tried all over the world. They’ve held sway here for at least four decades, if not six. And they have piled up a litany of failure so monumental that liberalism can only be propped up now by massive voting fraud, corruption of governmental institutions from top to bottom, and the active assistance of a liberal media establishment heavily invested in the continuation of the disaster, hoping against hope that next time — if they grant themselves more broad-ranging authority, go further and faster and pile it higher and deeper — it’ll work out like they mulishly believe it must, sooner or later. Only, y’know, it never has, and it never will.

Like sixteen percent unemployment, low productivity, and a hopeless and hopelessly intrenched class of Wards O’ The State? Like economic stagnation, huge government debt, and exorbitant taxes? LIke a culture so steeped in political correctness that thoughts and beliefs, however wrong-headed or offensive, become legally actionable as “hate crimes?” Like the gradual, endless erosion of your liberty drop by toxic drop; being told what lightbulbs you may buy, what toilet you may install, and whether you’ll be allowed to install it yourself; what car to drive; how you may set your thermostat?

Like paying absurd prices for oil and being dependent on foreign nations for it, when we have vast reserves that we’ll never be allowed to tap, while China and Cuba are helping themselves to it mere miles from the Florida coast — all in the name of promoting the ludicrously false religion of Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly “the weather”) — itself merely the flimsiest of masks for a global power grab more ambitious and insidious than any yet seen in a world whose history is rife with them?

Like porous borders; an enfeebled military; an enervated, irresolute, adrift populace that lacks the will to defend itself, or even to risk verbally slighting one of the most vicious and savage enemies Western civilization has ever faced — an enemy soon to gain access to nuclear weapons because we’re too craven to confront a rogue nation that has been making war on us for thirty years now, without even the most minimal consequences inflicted on them for it?

Hey, you may be a liberal.

Meanwhile, the principles of our Founders — what used to be called liberalism, until the word got perverted beyond all recognition in the Sixties, twisted into representing ideas and policies that are the exact opposite of its actual meaning — got us freedom, prosperity, power, influence, an ever-rising standard of living, and wave after wave of hardy immigrant souls willing to brave unimaginable hardship to get here to grab their share of the dream, and in so doing, renew it.

Can it be any wonder to anyone that we almost never hear them forthrightly say “Your ideas are mistaken,” as per above, preferring to dismiss their opponents as knuckledraggers, troglodytes, racists, Nazis, and terrorists? Is it any wonder that they regard honestly noting who and what they are as a “vicious smear campaign,” or that they shy from being called “liberal” or “socialist” like a startled mustang?

It’s tough to rationally argue their position, because arguing for the continuation of failure as the only solution to failure is not rational. And the fact that they have so much to be ashamed of, and a long, disgraceful history of debacle, catastrophe, and inadequacy that they refuse to own up to, isn’t gonna help them.