As the Moore vs. Franken Trash Olympics continues, liberals like Howard Fineman are going back to the future and renewing the One Free Grope indulgence that once got Bill Clinton out of purgatory, because Al Franken is a “lifelong champion of women’s rights.”

Meanwhile Sean Trende tweets:

I don’t think you can underestimate the degree to which many conservatives have this attitude: (a) we fought a battle over whether character counts, and got our asses handed to us and (b) liberal leaders always circle the wagons around their guys, and ours always cave.

We are past the time for worrying, like former Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, that not enough conservatives have read their Burke or their Russell Kirk.

As I wrote over a year ago: “All I Know is that Gentlemanly Conservatism is Dead.” Or as Gen. Patton said: “Now, I want you to remember that no son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country.”

That’s the reason we have President Trump and Steve Bannon. When no conservative ideas are allowed to microaggress the little darlings in their safe spaces in the nation’s schools and universities, because white privilege, we are not in a frank discussion of the issues any more.  We are living under an oppressive regime that labels our right to petition for the redress of grievances as out of bounds. Okay, we are not exactly in a Reign of Terror, but you’d better watch your step.

Hey, One Free Gropers, Trump in the "Access Hollywood" tapes was only talking about pussy grabbing. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) actually had himself selfied doing the dirty, back when selfies had just been invented! Talk about living on the bleeding edge: so cool! But Franken cares about women’s rights, just like Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein, so that makes him special.

The problem for normals is, as Sean Trende suggests, that when you argue that character counts in politics, you open yourself to a flank attack on any question of character, whether you are Richard Nixon defending the Silent Majority from the Sixties Kids, Robert Bork defending originalism from Ted Kennedy, Clarence Thomas defending the right to be a conservative black from liberal sweetie Anita Hill. Next thing you know, George W. Bush gets sideswiped for a DWI, and Donald Trump for a pussy tape.

Why are Democrats reduced to the Politics of October Surprises? I think it must be that the welfare state has nowhere left to turn. It has plundered the economy to hand out loot to its supporters about as far as it can go. It can’t excite workers with visions of retirement sugar plums; it already did that. It can’t excite parents with visions of glorious education for their children; it already did that. It is reduced to promising health insurance to the 30 million in the gap between employer insurance and Medicaid, and to lying about how everybody else will pay less. It is reduced to ignoring black-on-black violence. It is reduced to conjuring up fantastic stories about frying the planet. Or the moral necessity of gay marriage. Only problem is that ordinary people just don’t care about health insurance for the uninsured, or cops mowing down black homeboys, or the wonders of electric cars. These new issues don’t move the needle.

Failing to move the needle with gay marriage and electric cars Democrats advertise their political bankruptcy every day with the politics of personal destruction. Really, what better way to demoralize the bourgeoisie, the middling sort of people, than to accuse its leaders of sexual improprieties? Yes, it’s true, you can successfully gross out college women with locker-room talk and reduce voter turnout among the respectable classes.

Bad boy Vox Day has articulated the tactics needed for the new age. It is: We Don’t Care. The Children? Yeah, we already heard that one. Diversity? That’s racism, straight up. Hate speech? Look in the mirror, pal. Locker-room talk? So what is George Carlin going to do?

Let’s face it: the ruling class wants politics to be about sex scandals because it has nothing positive to offer the American people.

Wake up, ruling class. The politics of the future will be about the injustices you have visited on the middling sort of people: the competition from immigrants, the soaring price of homes, the slave system of college debt, the taxes on labor, the indignities visited on white guys by the diversity SSJW.

And it’s only just begun. Imagine if some political genius got the white working class and the respectable black middle class to vote together. It can’t be that hard. After all, we just elected a man that had never run before for political office. All it takes is a genius or a guy that knows how to hire them.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.