SO I LINKED TO THIS PIECE ON #METOO AND AL FRANKEN EARLIER, but I want to break out this part:

I found it an inoffensive burlesque of a burlesque—they were, after all, on a USO tour, which is a raunchy vaudeville throwback. But I recognized that my reaction belonged to the pre–#MeToo world. That’s the world Franken was still in when he issued this initial perfunctory apology: “As to the photo, it was clearly intended to be funny but wasn’t. I shouldn’t have done it.”

Franken was quickly engulfed by the post–#MeToo world. Just weeks prior to Tweeden’s release of the photo, The New York Times and The New Yorker published what became Pulitzer Prize–winning stories about decades of sexual misconduct and career threats against women by the film producer Harvey Weinstein. This was swiftly followed by accusations of appalling workplace behavior by a parade of prominent men. Many immediately lost their reputations and their jobs.

The photo of Franken caused a national convulsion. Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times wrote that it was “utterly dehumanizing,” and initially called for his immediate resignation. Seth Meyers, the talk-show host and SNL alum, said it was “horrifying.” Franken quickly understood the stakes, and issued a self-flagellating self-denunciation: “I feel disgusted with myself … It’s obvious how Leeann would feel violated by that picture. And, what’s more, I can see how millions of other women would feel violated by it.”

Something that was an inoffensive burlesque a few years ago is now a virtual crime against humanity? And now that it’s over, Democrats think they behaved badly? That sounds less like evolving standards of decency, and more like a species of mass hysteria. It says bad things about our political class, and the social media it is so influenced by, that it’s prone to such wild swings of emotion and shifting of standards. “But when passions run high, it is crucial that those most empowered to tamp down the mob don’t become part of it, and that the bedrock values of fairness and unbiased assessment remain untrammeled.”

Yeah, good luck with that.

One can feel schadenfreude when people who spark waves of moral hysteria get caught up by them, and still recognize that moral hysteria is no way to run a country — and a political class that wallows in it is not worthy to trust with the running.