The beltway is gaga for Ruth Marcus. She's been at the Washington Post for years and is a regular on the Mitchell Report and is a Villager in good standing. One of the reasons she gets such high marks from the Villagers is because as a supposed "liberal," she just loves to go Dirty Hippie-punching whenever she can. She even called the left wing blogosphere "deranged."

I know Ruth all too well, but her Thursday column even fooled me because it was so f*&king stupid. I haven't heard any Villager say Democrats are demagoguing the gender pay gap, since it's been a part of President Obama's platform from Day One, but she went there.

Democrats’ revolting equal-pay demagoguery

Here’s a radical notion: It is simultaneously possible to believe that women are entitled to equal pay and to not support the Paycheck Fairness Act.Not that you’d know it from the rhetoric President Obama and fellow Democrat are happily flinging at Republicans who dare to oppose the measure.

She states that she truly believes women should receive equal pay for equal work.

Before you start checking the byline at the top of this piece and emailing the editor that there’s been a terrible mistake, let me be clear: I support ensuring that women receive equal pay for equal work — I have a bit of a vested stake in that issue myself. Unequal pay remains a problem, although not at the women-earn-77-cents-on-the-dollar level of Democrats’ sloganeering. Most relevantly, I’d vote for the Paycheck Fairness Act in the unlikely event that someone elected me to Congress.

See, she's on our side! Oh, wait...

But the level of hyperbole — actually, of demagoguery — that Democrats have engaged in here is revolting.

I wonder how many times she's used the word "revolting" to describe how conservatives have acted in Congress since 2009? But she needed some dirty hippie punching to clear her head a bit, because then she says it's understandable.

It’s entirely understandable, of course: The Senate is up for grabs. Women account for a majority of voters. They tend to favor Democrats. To the extent that women — and in particular, single women — can be motivated to turn out in a midterm election, waving the bloody shirt of unequal pay is smart politics.

She's obviously on the side of big business in this struggle because she feels the Paycheck Fairness Act might treat them unfairly. That sounds like a conservative concern to me.

Here's a few of her other hippie-punching ideas:

Trumka: Ruth Marcus' Idea Is To Soak The Middle Class -- The Rich Have Gotten By

Ruth Marcus: Anyone Opposed To Catfood Commission Chairs' Report Is Behaving 'Childishly'

WaPo's Ruth Marcus Says All The Dirty Hippy Liberals Have To Bow Down To The Gang Of Four For Health Care Reform

Ruth Marcus: Let The Elderly Just Eat (Cheaper) Cake!

WaPo's Ruth Marcus: It Would Be 'Insane' To Restore Tax Rates For The Rich To Previous Levels