Ellen DeGeneres sat next to former President George W. Bush Sunday at the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers game in Dallas. A photo was taken by DeGeneres of the two and it went viral. The Twitter mob came for her.

The very people who virtue shame anyone within earshot about civility to justify hatred toward President Trump are the first to jump ugly when their delicate sensibilities are offended. Nothing threatens ideologues more than a friendship between a liberal and a conservative. In the real world, though, it is the norm, not the exception. Any person going through life with only those who agree with him or her politically is traveling in a rare circle.

I remember seeing the photo on Twitter Sunday and shrugging. Frankly, it’s pretty normal behavior for George W. Bush. The dirty little secret in politics is that conservatives bend more and quicker than liberals do when it comes to everyday life. In culture, this is especially true. Just sitting there and watching that game meant that Bush was turning a blind eye to the current social justice warrior behavior of professional NFL players. It’s his choice to make but it must have given him pause at some point when the kneeling on the sidelines began.

Ellen’s Twitter feed is a mess. A quick glance shows why she felt the need to address the reaction from the outrage mob. She posted a tweet with a video from her pre-recorded Tuesday show.

Yes, that was me at the Cowboys game with George W. Bush over the weekend. Here’s the whole story. pic.twitter.com/AYiwY5gTIS

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) October 8, 2019

Ellen explains that she and her wife were invited to be guests of owner Jerry Jones by his daughter, Charlotte. They were in his “fancy” owners suite, along with George and Laura Bush. Ellen did what anyone would do if sitting next to a former president at a public event – she took video footage of the two of them. It went downhill from there, even from the entertainment industry.

"I'm friends with George Bush," boasts Ellen, saying it's good to have friends with different views

But this isn't a matter of views; it's a matter of *crimes*. Bush is a war criminal with the blood of 1 million Iraqis on his hands. He should be in prisonhttps://t.co/IJvbvuhQQ0

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 8, 2019

Ah, yes. The party of tolerance is still calling Bush a war criminal. He shouldn’t be attending a football game, he should be locked up in jail. Got it. Hey, he “created ICE”, too. He must be shunned for protecting our borders and wanting to know who is in our country.

https://twitter.com/psych_gma/status/1181496982826827776

This “Voice of Social Justice” spoke up, too:

https://twitter.com/shaunking/status/1181523528669110272

There are good responses, too. Mostly, this is Ellen DeGeneres being Ellen DeGeneres. She once was as strong a critic of Bush as the rest of the Hollywood elite. Then she got really successful and really wealthy and now she’s friends with ex-presidents and other public figures so it’s all kumbaya now.

She knew what she was doing. See how tolerant I am? She still zings Republicans but just the ones she doesn’t know in real life. If a conservative is a friend, she’s just being tolerant. DeGeneres now wants you to know she can be friends with conservatives, at least the wealthy and well-known ones. She’s into a different kind of virtue-shaming now.

“Here’s the thing: I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have,” DeGeneres continued. “We’re all different and I think that we’ve forgotten that that’s okay that we’re all different… but just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them.”

“When I say, ‘Be kind to one another,’ I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone. Doesn’t matter.”

What she is doing, though, is simply being an adult. Grown-ass people know that in order to live in civil society, interactions will happen and we are expected to be mature enough to handle it. It is silly to pat yourself on the back for acting like an adult, which she is doing if we are being honest here. A true test of how magnanimous she is would be to be sitting next to someone from Trump World. During the two terms of George W. Bush, she was as vocal as anyone else against him.

This week the Supreme Court is taking up a case of particular interest of the LGBTQ community. The timing of DeGeneres’s interaction with Bush was noted ironically. The left is nothing if not predictable.

The “be kind” mantra is the politically correct way of saying “be a decent human being”. The left needs that lesson as much as any of those they criticize. To call this gesture a moment of restoring faith in humankind is hyperbole, to put it kindly.