So on and on the insults come, under the guise of “debate.”

Obama haters are told that not only does he not love America and he tilts toward terrorist sympathies, but the dead-enders’ bottom line has always been that Obama’s a failure and America has suffered incalculable losses under his leadership.

His fevered critics made that same claim in 2012, only to watch Obama waltz to reelection.

And that’s the catch: Virtually every claim they made about Obama turned out to be wrong, whether it was how Obamacare was going to bankrupt the economy (not to mention kill off old people), how he was driving gas prices through the roof, he couldn’t create American jobs, he was going to take away your guns, he was letting Iran obtain nuclear weapons and letting Ebola sweep our shores, how he gave the Benghazi stand down order, and unleashed the I.R.S. on his enemies.

All of it turned out to be wrong. (Obama being a Muslim and a socialist, too.)

Under Obama, the stock market’s up more than 9,000 points, the unemployment rate has nearly been cut in half, and USA Today reports that drivers in many states may soon see gas stations advertising $1 per-gallon fill-ups.

So where’s the seething anger from?

Is the barely-controllable rage confirmation that the American electorate is changing, and not for the better from the Republican perspective? Is it quiet corroboration that, even according to some Republican operatives, a Donald Trump nomination this year could mean ruin for the GOP come November?

Meanwhile, does Obama’s presidency rank among the most successful? I’ll leave that debate to the academics. But it’s obvious that Obama’s successful two-term run has never matched the almost comical portrait painted by his adolescent, name-calling critics. (For context, Obama’s current approval rating is not far off from Ronald Reagan’s at this same point of his second term, according to Gallup.)

What’s amazing to watch is that their parallel-universe view of Obama has only intensified over the years. You’d think the white-hot anger might subside over time, especially when it became clear Obama governed as a traditional, center-left Democrat, not as some sort of Marxist radical.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote this week:

The Obama administration has done things people like me strongly disagree with. But America is in better economic shape than any other major nation on earth. Crime is down. Abortion rates are down. Fourteen million new jobs have been created in five years. Obama has championed a liberal agenda, but he hasn’t made the country unrecognizable.

But Brooks’ (sometimes) pragmatic brand of conservatism is no longer in favor among professionals in the fever swamp where logical observations about Obama (i.e. what’s the big deal?) are rarely acknowledged.

Indeed, their unruly rage has only intensified, to the point where it seems like the permanent state of phony outrage is the entire point of the play production.