Be warned, the rules governing the culture are changing. It is now okay – according at least to "Saturday Night Live" – to portray women as being "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty," as long as they are conservatives or in the employ of President Donald J. Trump.

The rules for liberals are still the same. You still can't refer to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as "Fauxcahontas" without being called a sexist, a racist or worse. You can't make fun of Hillary Rodham Clinton's newfound penchant for walking around in outfits that look like over-sized oven mitts. And you most certainly can't, at least not in polite company, say anything about her husband's history as a serial sex abuser.

What you can do – according to "Saturday Night Live," still the gold standard of what passes for political humor - is put Kellyanne Conway, one of the most powerful women in the country in a negligee and portray her as having broken into the apartment of a cable news superstar on a sex-crazed mission to get airtime on the network. And when said anchor proves un-seducible despite ample provocation, have her transform into a knife-wielding psychopath.

For about seven minutes Saturday, it was as though show-runner Lorne Michaels had once again departed, replaced by an even darker version of Jean Doumanian, a one-time executive producer whose brief tenure at the top produced a product so unfunny it almost killed the show.

Editorial Cartoons on Democrats in the Trump Era View All 58 Images

It's not that the sketch wasn't funny – it wasn't – or that it was deliberately provocative. One comes to expect such things. It drives the buzz and the buzz drives the ratings and the ratings mean everybody makes money and has their contracts renewed and lives happily ever after. It's that the reportedly sensible, charming, hard-working, sensitive, liberated, modern men and women who write the show took such pleasure in sexualizing in an extremely demeaning way a woman whose politics they cannot abide.

It would be easy to write it off as a harmless example of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the idea that progressives cannot get over the president having stolen the election away from their blessed anointed one. But this went so much deeper, doing just about everything the harpies who marched on Washington the week after Trump was inaugurated told us no one was allowed to do, say or even think about women.

It's as though Conway and the president's daughter Ivanka, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and other women whom Trump has selected for important positions are being placed on public display for the purpose of being ridiculed because the cultural elites see them as nothing more than traitors to their gender. Collectively, they are saying to these women and to any who might admire them for their considerable accomplishments "You're not with the program and we're going to run you over. Be warned."

This kind of group think – while endorsed by the leaders of the so-called women's movement as evidenced by their silence – is dangerous. It creates a bubble, a big cloudy bubble through which those inside cannot see into the outside world. They can't see where they've broken faith with those whose values are, for lack of a better word, traditional and who place value on things like mutual respect, motherhood and the meritocracy. It's a disease of the elites, one that turns them all into Hillary wannabes totally unaware that anything she has achieved in life since her husband was elected attorney general of Arkansas was in no small measure due to his power, his influence, his friends and the leg up that provided here. That's not to say she wouldn't have succeeded on her own; just that she didn't.

It's not clear if the animosity towards Conway and those like her is driven by ideology or by what was once called the problem of the "Mean Girls," a concept brilliantly illustrated in a film by Tina Fey, coincidentally an SNL alum herself most famous for her stinging portrayal of former Alaska Gov. and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In real life, conservative women in the public seem happy and optimistic much of the time while their liberal counterparts conduct themselves as though they are full of rage and certain total destruction is just around the next corner.