In a 2009 Huffington Post essay, former New York Times editor Melissa Laskey mourned Democrat icon Ted Kennedy. Laskey noted that Kennedy had once driven a car into water and left Mary Jo Kopechne to die.

Though he fled responsibility and sought cover in the Kennedy mansion, his career flourished. Reflecting that Kopechne shared Kennedy's politics, Laskey wrote she might have felt that it was "worth it."

Recently, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts acknowledged Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden. Pitts counseled readers to vote for Biden, even had they found Reade's story compelling.

"If Reade were sacrificed to the cause of preventing that [Trump's re-election], it would be painful and unfair, yet arguably defensible," the columnist actually wrote.

Pitts characterized ballots cast for a candidate voters thought had perpetrated sexual assault a "terrible choice forced upon us by the exigencies of a fraught moment."

This is a fancy way of fleeing moral accountability. One upside of Trump Derangement Syndrome, like Camelot reverence, is its exposing of moral pretension.

DC Larson is an author, blogger, and freelance essayist. His byline has run in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, and elsewhere.

Image: Marc Nozell via Flickr.