National Review's Rich Lowry [Email him] has come out with this attack on political correctness in national and international affairs:

The fainting couch doesn’t have the same cachet it did in the 19th century, which is a shame, because it should be more in demand than at any time since the age of corsets and delicate sensibilities.

To put it in Victorian terms, 2014 had a case of the vapors. It was all aflutter. It needed smelling salts and a fan, and a good rest on a fainting couch to restore its bearings. It was a year when the national pastime of taking offense and of fearing that someone might be offended reached such parodic levels that Kim Jong-un got in the act.

It used to be that, of all the groups and nations that one had to worry about offending, for politically correct or commercial reasons, the North Koreans simply didn’t rate. The Red Dawn remake a couple of years ago featured cruel North Korean invaders. In last year’s Olympus Has Fallen, the White House is attacked and occupied by dastardly North Koreans. But 2014 was the year, thanks to the hack of Sony Pictures in retaliation for the spoof movie The Interview, that even the North Koreans made the “do not offend” list.

It was the year that a scientist made an abject apology for wearing a shirt that offended feminists in a TV broadcast; that Amazon Prime put a label warning of racist content on Tom and Jerry cartoons; and that various news outlets refused to say the name of the NFL team from Washington on grounds that even uttering it made them complicit in rank offensiveness.

It was a year when the nation’s colleges and...