First it was Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s expletive-laced sermons and anti-Semitic rants that plunged the Obama campaign into full damage-repair mode. Then Barack triggered an uproar when he remarked about down-on-their-luck voters, “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

That’s right, the reason those yahoos place their faith in a Higher Power is because they can’t find themselves find a decent job.

Then Obama turned on Hillary. During a Pennsylvania campaign stop he twice stuck his opponent with the harsh, “Shame on her.” Mocking her new-found support for gun rights, he compared her to a warmed-over Annie Oakley.

So much for Barack the Unifier.

Candidate Hillary Clinton has made her share of caustic remarks as well, often directing her barbs at members of the male species.

Shortly after she announced her candidacy, Clinton traveled to Iowa to press the flesh. In response to a question about persons like Osama bin Laden, she responded with a sly grin, “And what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?”

And hours before she pulled off her New Hampshire primary upset, Hillary regaled the audience with this biting stereotype: “the remnants of sexism are alive and well.”

Not so long ago, liberalism was synonymous with tolerance and open-mindedness. If you weren’t of the liberal ilk, you were almost suspected of being a closet bigot.

But in the last decade, the good name of liberalism has gone to the gutter.

Remember the racist, thick-lipped caricatures of Condi Rice when she was named Secretary of State? Recall former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill who blamed the 9/11 attack on the victims themselves? And how is it that modern liberalism has come to embrace resurgent anti-Semitism?

Then there’s the suppression of free speech on college campuses.

At Colorado College, the Feminist and Gender Studies Program produces the Monthly Rag. The latest issue featured an excerpt from The Bitch Manifesto and a vulgar discussion of “packing” in which a woman creates the appearance of a male genitalia under her clothes.

But when a group of men issued its own flyer satirizing the Monthly Rag, progressive administrators charged the students with violating the campus speech code.

So how did liberalism devolve into a wellspring of potty-mouth rants, crude stereotypes, and campus intolerance?

Part of the reason, I’m convinced, is the ever-strengthening grip of radical feminist ideology on the liberal conscience.

Were you in New Orleans this past weekend? If not, do you realize you missed Jane Fonda’s reading of The Vagina Monologues at the Super Dome?

Actress Kerry Washington was also there. She was particularly touched because the Monologues compares a woman’s vagina to New Orleans and the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. (I’m not making this up!)

Recently I had the unpleasant task of reading Catherine MacKinnon’s 1989 tome, Toward a Feminist Theory of State. Now required reading in women’s studies programs, the book is best described as the Mein Kampf of the radical feminist movement.

While Mein Kampft blamed Aryans’ woes on an alleged international Jewish plot, Toward a Feminist Theory of State sees men as secretly aligned in a vast anti-woman conspiracy.

MacKinnon alarms the reader with improbable statistics such as “85% of working women will be sexually harassed,” and “one-fifth of American women have been or are known to be prostitutes.”

She then concludes that “the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”

By reducing females to docile and helpless creatures who lack moral agency, MacKinnon does an enormous disservice to women. In the end, her high-octane screed epitomizes gender intolerance at its worst.

Five years after MacKinnon’s book was published, along came Sen. Joe Biden’s Violence Against Women Act. That became the occasion for another round of male-bashing.

Newspaper reports openly portray men as wily batterers. But when singer Amy Winehouse admits to using her husband Blake as a punch-bag, persons look the other way. “I’ll beat up Blake when I’m drunk. … If he says one thing I don’t like then I’ll chin him,” she once bragged.

Just imagine, I once believed the Democratic agenda would bring about a kinder, gentler existence to our planet. Now I’m beginning to have my doubts. I suspect many Americans will feel the same way come Election Day.

Carey Roberts