Do conservatives REALLY feel moral outrage over the moral improprieties of the left? Were people REALLY shocked and dismayed by Bill Clinton’s dalliance with an intern?

Or were people feigning moral outrage to score political points?

We have an opportunity to see in the coming months.

Bill O’Reilly stands accused of marital infidelity with an underling. An infidelity compounded by the fact that the woman was unwilling.

A conservative blogger’s analysis of the Bill O’Reilly case is here.

Essentially, this experience trial lawyer deduces that she had the man on tape. So there is very little doubt that he did the creepy things alleged in her lawsuit.

(Unresolved is why the heck she didn’t just hang up on him. She’s a real piece of work too, IMHO.)

Morality-pushers getting caught by their own rhetorical snares is nothing new. I , for one, never was that upset by Bill Bennett’s gambling. He may have lost a bunch of money, but it wasn’t a bunch of money to him. There were no victims. Bill Bennett’s gambling is morally the equivalent of me losing ten dollars to the Foreign Minister in a friendly poker game. The Smallestholders aren’t going to go hungry.

Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction, while revealing him to be a hypocrite, didn’t victimize anyone but himself. While it probably wasn’t fair that he wasn’t prosecuted for his crime, that’s American justice: he beat the rap because he was rich, not because he had some conservative-black-hat-smoking-man-get-out-of-jail-free-mojo. His claims of being targeted by law enforcement were also ridiculous and put one in mind of Marion Barry’s “Bitch set me up!” defense. All in all, Rush’s actions, while illegal and disgraceful, weren’t all that bad.

The O’Reilly thing is much worse. He evidently abused his power with, he claimed, many different women.

He ought to be fired and villified.

His ratings are up.

Are people turning in out of curiousity? Schadenfreude?

Are conservatives rallying around the flag like they did with Rush?

We will have to wait and see what happens with his ratings. If conservatives (and Americans as a whole) really believe that people who make immoral choices ought to be held to account, his audience will wither.

I, for one, won’t hold my breath.