Hypocrisy Hypocrisy
The Democrats, being still very much the party of Lyndon Baines Johnson, have never enjoyed a great reputation for integrity, but the past few days have been especially hard on them: California Democratic state senator and gun-rights foe Leland Yee was indicted as an illegal arms trafficker operating in partnership with a murder-for-hire operation headed by a Hong Kong gangster known as “Shrimp Boy”; the Democratic mayor of Charlotte, Patrick Cannon, was indicted on public-corruption charges related to local development and transit projects and to his allegedly accepting bribes in connection with a planned feminine-hygiene empire; in New York, a Democratic assemblyman’s office was raided on suspicion of misuses of travel funds; the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate, Harry Reid, was caught channeling thousands of dollars in campaign money to his granddaughter, while omitting her surname, which is his surname, from the record...

...When a conservative suffers from a moral failing, it is taken as an indictment of conservatism itself, even though conservatism in the Anglo–Protestant tradition is founded upon the expectation that moral failing is universal. In that sense, every Scott DesJarlais tells conservatives what we already know: that man is a fallen creature, and that, contra the Obamacare regime, there are no exemptions to be handed out from that condition, no waivers from human nature. The progressive view, on the other hand, is that our politics and our institutions could be channels of moral action and reliably ethical arbiters of such ill-defined standards as “fairness” and “social justice,” if only we put the right people in power.