Conservatives should know better than to so quickly validate a dishonest narrative that benefits the other side, by Bruce Thornton.

Welcome to another debate on everything except the issues. Consider the reporting on Trump’s comments, which is the mother of all dog-bites-man-stories.  …

But once again, the Democrats and their Republican fifth column think words are more important than reality. Indeed, Planned Parenthood, recipient of much Democrat largesse and political cover, said, “What Trump described in these tapes amounts to sexual assault.”

But real sexual assault like Bill Clinton’s gets a yawn when the perpetrator is politically simpatico. I understand why the Democrats do it, but the Republicans’ motives elude me. They seem to be driven by some standard of “conservative” purity of the sort for which they regularly criticize the Tea Party, or by class prejudices that find Trump and his supporters vulgar, stupid upstarts who refuse to listen to their betters. They may be jumping ship to preserve their careers and influence, or making an electoral calculation about getting the woman’s vote.

They seem to forget that squeaky-clean Mitt Romney was savaged as a sexist for his “binders” full of the resumes of qualified women. Memo to NeverTrumpers: no matter what a Republican does, no matter how much he panders, he will always be a racist and sexist capitalist pig.

There’s something else, though, going on — some Republicans’ bad habit of accepting identity-politics narratives about race or women, and then preemptively cringing to prove that they are not benighted racists or sexists deserving of political and social shaming. That is, the same gutlessness in the face of political correctness that in part fueled Trump’s improbable rise to become the Republican candidate for president.

So Paul Ryan, who earlier called Trump a “racist,” said that Trump’s comments were “sickening.” No, Congressman, using the power of the presidency to get sexual favors, and then perjuring yourself when questioned about it, is sickening. Calling yourself a feminist and telling us that victims of sexual assault “have a right to be believed,” when you have “savaged” victims of your own husband’s depredations, is sickening.

hat-tip Stephen Neil