Following on my prediction of last week that the selection of Paul Ryan as the Republican vice-presidential candidate would energize what had been shaping up to be an extremely lackluster campaign, the undergrowth has already erupted with Democratic sniper fire in an unholy crusade to portray Paul Ryan as the reincarnation of Torquemada, trying to starve to death the elderly and disadvantaged of America while forcing American women of all ages into chastity belts, and distributing tax rebates to billionaires. Maureen Dowd, the female cardinal archbishop of schismatic America and Democratic sharpshooter-in-chief, with Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and Santorum all notches on her anti-habit, shattered the summer air with her disconcertion. The fierce cuckoo bird that quite often debouches from her forehead on Catholic issues hurtled out, shrieking and snapping, three times in one week.

Ms. Dowd’s opening cannon was that Ryan was a new Dick Cheney. To Democrats, that is like a young Lucifer. In her pyrotechnic horror at the thought that the election might not be just a good Mitt-shoot, for which she had been in disciplined target practice for all six years of his announced campaign for the presidency, with the prize to whoever pours more buckshot into the candidate, and that there might actually be a discussion of issues, she was reduced to citing the hitherto underrecognized political scientist Tom Morello, guitarist in the band Rage Against the Machine. Morello wrote in Rolling Stone that Ryan himself is in a rage against women, immigrants, workers, gays, the poor, and the environment. Rather than write it herself, Ms. Dowd, with uncharacteristically demure reserve, also quoted journeyman liberal political correspondent Howard Fineman (chiefly associated with Newsweek on the left, but ranging all the way to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The New Republic on the left, before arriving at the Huffington Post, also generally on the left). Fineman wrote that Ryan was a “power-hungry, ladder-climbing trimmer,” a description that could be applied at times to every president except Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, and Gerald Ford, who won only one presidential election between them.

Adding her own sage impartiality to these disinterested commentators, she observed that a presidential candidate who can be animated only by an outside source is doomed, and cited Dukakis’s dependence on his wife and Robert Dole’s on C-SPAN. She was foraging desperately to produce that absurd analysis, but felt more sure-footed with Grover Norquist’s comparison of Ryan with Cheney, whom Dowdists regard as a horned, spike-tailed, trident-wielding denizen of Washington’s darkest lagoon. She breathily warned that Ryan (like most members of Congress) supported funding the Afghan and Iraq wars (while opposing most abortion bills (a position, in these particular cases, held by about half the voters). The belligerently lapsed Dowd put Ryan into a distant purgatory because “even Catholic bishops, who had to be dragged toward compassion in the pedophile scandal, were dismayed at how uncompassionate Ryan’s budget was.” Jesuits and nuns were cited in ideological dissent to Ryan, and he was chastised for stipulating in one bill that rape be “forcible.” (As Dowd will recall, Rome is a broad church and contains many liberals and no shortage of outright socialists. It wasn’t conservative economic and social policy that drove her into the thickets of heresy.) My views on this subject are not controversial and would give no offense to any sane feminist, but unless Dowd is going to declare all intercourse criminal, even between fully consenting spouses, there has to be some degree of force, physical or otherwise, to make it rape. 

Dowd allowed only five days before she erupted again. Tarring Ryan with the brush of being less compassionate than child-molesting clergy would not suffice. Because he had voted with Missouri’s Senate candidate Todd Akin on some abortion bills, and despite the fact that Ryan has urged Akin to withdraw from the race, Dowd assimilated him to Akin’s infamous acknowledgment of the notion of “legitimate rape.” This was an outrageous smear even by the most frenzied Dowdist standards.

Republicans should be satisfied that the Ryan nomination snatched from the fantasies and mouths of the Dowdists the prospects of an election that would only be an escalated turkey shoot, while the Obama administration ignored its $5 trillion of new deficits, its unfathomable credulity toward the Iran it attempted to engage, the Russia with which it tried to reset, and the 77 poorer countries that it tried to shower in $100 billion of annual Danegeld to appease our Western consciences for having prosperous economies. The success of the Ryan nomination is capable of almost scientific calibration in the fury and frequency of Dowdist fulminations. Paul Ryan is a traditional Roman Catholic, but to imply that he is morally on a plane with the tiny minority of Catholic clergy guilty of sex offenses, or that he is indulgent of rape, is so scandalous it must be considered aberrant.