Important Reminder

George Will's Now, Defining Decency Down is an article worth reading. It is a reminder that a little humility and humanity every now and then are not overrated.

Craig's unraveling involved a sadness almost unfathomable to anyone who has not felt it necessary to live, as he seems to have done for years, disguising one's nature. The fact that Craig deepened his misery with an absurd "explanation" that was, in its way, lewd increased the duty to feel compassion for him. But the presidential candidate he supported quickly pounced, issuing a statement devoid of human sympathy. Craig, said Mitt Romney, seizing yet another opportunity to stroke social conservatives, "reminds us of Mark Foley and Bill Clinton" and, "frankly, it's disgusting."

If Romney fails to translate his intelligence and accomplishments into the Republican nomination, one reason will be the suspicion that there is something synthetic and excessively calculating about every move in his increasingly embarrassing courtship of those who are called "values voters." If they can be courted that way, their values need a tuneup.

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Last week, there was nationwide merriment at the expense of an 18-year-old participant in a South Carolina beauty pageant. Asked a question about why many Americans might lack elementary knowledge about the world, she got lost in syntactical tangles and spoke nonsense. Although there was not a shred of news value in it, Fox News and CNN played the tape of her mortification, and by last Friday YouTube's presentation of it had generated more than 10 million hits. The casual cruelty of publicizing her discomfort, and the widespread entertainment pleasure derived from it, is evidence that standards of decency are evolving in the wrong direction.