Unless you've been living under a rock these past few weeks, you know that liberals have lost their minds over Donald Trump's coming pick for Supreme Court justice.

It brings to mind that R.E.M. classic from 2003:

It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine

Six o'clock, T.V. hour, don't get caught in foreign tower
Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn
Lock him in uniform, book burning, bloodletting
Every motive escalate, automotive incinerate
Light a candle, light a motive, step down, step down
Watch your heel crush, crush, uh oh
This means no fear, cavalier, renegade and steering clear
A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline

Democrats are slightly more distraught about the prospect of another conservative justice on the Court.

Grabien has compiled a "Greatest Hits" video montage of the most outrageous, the looniest, the most neurotic warnings about just how bad things are going to get for gays, women who want abortions, and minorities:

Liberal critics are caught in a classic negative feedback loop, where each dire prediction by one liberal pundit or commentator is repeated and amplified by the next, until you end up so far afield from reality that their pronouncements become parodies of themselves.

To wit:

MSNBC's Ali Velshi narrated a segment listing various things gay Americans will likely lose under the new court.  "If I were involved in a same-sex marriage" in a conservative state, Velshi said, "I'd be panicking." 

MSNBC analyst Midwin Charles said that with the exception of "straight, white males," everyone should be "freaking out" about the next Supreme Court justice.

An editor at the Daily Beast, Erin Gloria Ryan, said that if Trump were to pick a woman for the job, she should be known as the villain in "A Handmaid's Tale" due to her anticipated antipathy to preserving federal abortion guarantees.  Another CNN guest, Neal Katyal, said the next justice could take the Court "in a really dangerous direction."

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow cautioned that birth control could soon become illegal and told viewers that this is a "pull the fire alarm moment."

MSNBC contributor Al Sharpton cryptically cautioned: "All human and civil rights are at stake."

CNN contributor and MoveOn.org adviser, Karine Jean-Pierre, said the rights of workers, women, gays and transgenders "could be gone."

"Everything is at stake when you're looking at the SCOTUS pick, everything that we worked for for decades is on stake, abortion, working – worker's rights, everything, same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, everything that we have worked so hard for now could be gone," Jean Pierre warned.

CNN's Baraki Sellers said the damage won't just be over the short-term, but will last "for generations to come."

What "rights" are at risk of being eliminated or severely curtailed?  Some of these "rights" are imagined or are confused with politics.  For other "rights," there isn't a chance in Hell that any court – no matter how conservative – would eliminate them.  What is really at risk for the left – and what really scares leftists – is that the Supreme Court will no longer act as an unelected legislature, creating precedents and law divorced from the original intent of the Constitution.

Liberals find our founding document most inconvenient.  It's too hard to change via constitutional amendment.  It restricts government from creating "true social justice" (or at least liberals' idea of social justice).  And then there's all that stuff about "originalism" and the "intent of the founders." 

The Supreme Court has been the left's primary weapon to remake America in leftists' social democratic image.  But to do that, the court must eliminate a constitutionally based federal republic.  A decent pick by Trump won't necessarily roll back the clock on court decisions, but it will, in classic conservative fashion, "stand athwart history and yell Stop!" 

Liberal hysteria is only partly deliberate.  Many of them have convinced themselves that their lunacy actually has a connection to reality.  In two, three, or five years, when this new court will have had an opportunity to make its mark on the law, and these "rights" that they are warning will be eliminated or curtailed are virtually untouched, will there be sheepish admissions on the part of these pundits that they had it all wrong, that it really isn't nearly as bad as they made out?

Don't bet on it.