For years, some of the purist conservatives have lamented the dearth of conservative purists, at least among those running for president; expressing disdain for McCain, Bush and Romney, and nursing their deep sense of woe. Had they one of their own, deep red and rock solid, they would … drop him in a flash for an ex-Democrat and a friend of the Clintons, howl him down when he said the words “vote your conscience,” and connive at his public demise. Ted Cruz can tell you what you need to know about purist conservatives, and their judgment and standards. And the story does not end with that.
For years, another kind of conservative purist had established himself as a cultural bulwark, foe of trash talk, tight clothes and loose morals, scourge of Bill Clinton and all he embodied, under the banner of “Character Counts.” His sexual past, his draft-dodging exploits, his financial extortions and distortions of truth launched a hundred careers, a thousand best-sellers, and a million laments that he and his wife should have ever come close to the center of power, much less have been given it twice.
Enter a GOP nominee to whom this applies and goes double — and adds to it a layer of callous brutality that leaves even the Clintons dumbfounded — and they do a 180-degree leap into an alternative universe in which it ceases to matter at all. “Trump-Loving Christians Owe Bill Clinton an Apology,” writes James Merritt, correctly. “It’s perplexing that the former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed declared that ‘character matters’ when it came to Clinton but privately offered to run Trump’s campaign in 2012. It’s hard to understand how the former Family Research Council head Gary Bauer ran television ads in the ’90’s calling for Clinton’s resignation due to a ‘virtue deficit’ but now supports Donald Trump.” And it’s hard to see how former virtue czar Bill Bennett now calls Trump resisters “former friends, who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority” when it was his own sense of moral superiority (over the Clintons, and assorted other conveniently liberal enemies ) that was the basis on which he built his career.
When Bennett said National Review’s Jonah Goldberg was on his “high horse” about Trump and his shortcomings, Goldberg compiled a list of the titles of some Bennett books — “The Book of Virtues,” “The Devaluing of America,” and “The Death of Outrage — Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals” among them — to back up his assertion that few knew “the view from the saddle” like Bill. From his perch in the saddle, Bennett doesn’t seem to think that “Donald Trump and the Assault on American Ideals” is much of a problem. It’s almost as if he and the others thought that the real fault of Bill Clinton was that he was a Democrat who won a lot of elections, and not that he was that much of a sinner at all.
In the late ’90’s, they and the rest of the Right had a great deal of fun when the Democrats — who had a great run with Harassment, Inc. since the Hill-Thomas hearings — suddenly discovered a new vein of tolerance once the accused became one of their own.
Feminists who thought a bad joke was the end of the world suddenly decided groping wasn’t that bad when Bill Clinton did it, and urged understanding for the plight of the much-maligned powerful male. See, the Right said, “these people never had principles all along, only partisan talking points.” Conservatives, who were so right on the left eighteen years ago, ought to turn their eyes now on themselves.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
