The Party of Shrug

Okay, so this Victor Davis Hanson round-up of liberal elite and Democratic Party moral failures , including several egregious plagiarism cases such as the recent Fareed Zakaria, is Red Meat, I admit it.

But still, what is up with liberal America these days? Why doesn’t it discipline its elites more often? Or at least make some pretense of doing so?

Again, who are the Democrats of stature? Why do they make no noise when an embarrassment like Warren is allowed to remain their candidate? Why do they not denounce Democratic mayors who imply they can and will attack free-speech? Where are the Gillibrand, Cuomo, or Kaine denunciations of anyone on VDH’s list of shame? Right now around the country, there are hundreds of Democratic-voting college administrators reviewing their notes about their particular institution’s honor code, reminding themselves how to explain it to the incoming freshmen, how to define plagiarism, hate-speech, bullying, etc. But who calls for Reid and Obama to abide by any sort of honor code? Who denounces the lying-and-incivility-recommending sophist George Lakoff for claiming to be an authority on “Talking Democratic”? Who scolds his university, his publisher, and the media outlets for lending credence to this claim?

And have we heard a single scent of a rumor in all the days of this rather truth-twisting administration that key Democrat leaders or donors were not happy with that?

Seriously, as I wind this rant down, I tell you I know politics is politics, and has always been the haunt of many a scoundrel and liar, but we at least used to have a certain shame-preserving hypocrisy at work, I thought. I was never willing to fully join William Bennett in counting Democrat unwillingness to impeach Clinton as “The Death of Outrage”(man, I hate titles like that), but the shame mechanism in our politics seems no longer to spring the way it once did, and especially on the liberal and Democratic side.