There is nothing American liberals like better than thinking they are better than other people. They like it better than winning elections. They like it better than raising taxes. Hell, they may even like it more than they like abortion.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than on the current political fight about Syrian refugees. Americans, by and large, are hugely opposed to continuation of the program, at least for now, by huge, massive margins. In fact, only 46% of Democrats even want to continue the program as-is without a pause for evaluation of what screening measures, exactly we are taking with regards to these people. As a result, Republican governors are doing what politicians are supposed to do, which is be responsive to the people who have elected them; in this case, those people are basically crying out that the refugee program needs to be paused.

This gives the American liberal the opportunity to engage in their favorite bedtime fantasy – the one where they get to role play being better than the great unwashed horde of middle America. Pretty representative examples of this can be found by new CBS contributor Jamelle Bouie, who posits that if you want to pause the refugee program you are both a coward and a friend to ISIS, and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio who has been loudly trumpeting his Betterness on cable news all day, waving around the picture of the dead boy in Turkey every time someone points a camera at him, even if the camera is just attached to a cell phone.

Of course, the one liberal in America who most derives autoerotic pleasure from looking down his noses at ordinary Americans is Barack Obama, who has threatened to veto any measure that even temporarily pauses his refugee resettlement program.

Liberals like Obama, de Blasio, and Bouie like to believe that they are better than Americans because they are viewing this with the eye of compassion (informed, of course, by their intellectual clear-headed superiority) whereas the vast majority of Americans are viewing this through the lens of bigotry. One scarcely can imagine a world in which Obama, de Blasio, Bouie and their ilk would not reach for a bigotry-related motive for their political opponents, no matter the question.

It certainly would never occur to Obama, et al, to ask themselves why only 6 short weeks ago, a majority of Americans supported allowing more Syrian refugees to come here – whereas now only 28% do. At some point during that short 6 week period, was there a Syrian racist virus released in America that turned us all into lesser beings, thus giving liberals an opportunity to engage in their favorite alone time pastime?

Or were Americans’ perceptions of the program shaped by actual events on the ground – i.e., we’ve all been watching the news and have seen how active ISIS militants have quietly assimilated themselves with the migrant flood into Europe and have turned Paris into a scene from a Call of Duty video game.

And maybe, just maybe, the American people hear the guy on television telling us that his screening procedure is great and foolproof, and they think to themselves, “Wait, isn’t this the same Yahoo who said last week that the situation was contained and everything is under control? Is anyone else double checking this clueless President’s work with respect to protecting us from ISIS?”

Liberals are going to get killed politically on this issue, especially if (as seems highly likely at this point) one or more of these refugees stages a major terrorist attack in the United States. But at least people like Jamelle Bouie and Barack Obama will be able to one day lecture a university classroom about how much braver and better they were than average Americans when they bravely declared that security was for suckers back during the great ISIS scare that they will have by then invented and jammed into history textbooks.