Sanctimony Inc.

Just last week, we were treated to still more media and establishment contempt for Trump’s crude and obscene hot-mic banter — but strangely just as the “sex poodle” Al Gore and the hugger of reluctant women, plagiarist, and practitioner of racist banter Joe Biden hit the campaign trail to warn us of Trump’s low-rent character and to dream of punching him out. (“No, I wish we were in high school, and I could take him behind the gym,” Biden mused about Trump. “That’s what I wish.”) Imagine a former VP Dick Cheney boasting of a desire to fist-fight the Democratic nominee, or Reince Priebus bragging in e-mails to the Trump campaign that he had prior knowledge of debate questions, or Corey Lewandowsky boasting that he had hired thugs to disrupt Hillary’s campaign rallies. Because there are no such parallels, instead we get psychodramas about a Venezuelan beauty queen.

Inciting violence by the use of inflammatory language used to be something liberals publicly condemned. But now taking Trump out physically is apparently a progressive dream, as Robert De Niro (“I’d like to punch Trump in the face”) earlier had foreshadowed Biden’s dreams of physical assault. Meanwhile, liberals strain to find the right metaphor for Trump — Mussolini and Hitler being the most common — while some conservatives prefer brownshirts or Stalin.

All during this campaign, the NASCAR crowd has been lectured on the dangerous consequences of their ignorance by establishment plagiarists such as Fareed Zakaria, Maureen Dowd, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, by hollow men like John Podesta, sexual scoundrels such as Bill Clinton, and by racist slanderers like Harry Reid — with opportune finger-wagging from the ethically compromised Donna Brazile and fabulists like Brian Williams. Such shrill hypocrisy does not excuse Trump’s transgressions, but it does confirm a general picture that our intellectual and public elite play by different rules from others, and their sanctimoniousness should be ignored.

It also remains a curious artifact of this election that many conservatives are outraged far more by Trump’s obnoxiousness, crudity, and rhetorical excesses than they are by Hillary’s concrete record of premeditated criminality and habitual prevarication — especially given the likelihood that on illegal immigration, defense spending, Obamacare, abortion, the debt, taxes, and regulation, Trump’s published agenda is the far more conservative.