[WASHINGTONTIMES] The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed how there’s a limit to how much bad behavior can saturate a society before society lowers standards for everybody. He called it “defining deviancy down.” “When you begin to think that it’s not really that bad,” he said, “pretty soon you become accustomed to very destructive behavior.”

That’s where we are now, with a government official asked to leave a restaurant because the owner doesn’t like her boss, and a member of Congress urging her constituents to organize a mob to harass conservatives — “in a restaurant, department store, or gasoline station” — to “push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome — anymore, anywhere.”

Some Democrats are alarmed, not necessarily because such vigilante rhetoric is wrong, but it’s risky political strategy with the midterm congressional elections looming just ahead. They’re concerned that Rep. Maxine Waters is not the image of the party they want to project in the months leading to Nov. 6. “Confirmation bias” is insidiously at work, enabling Rep. Waters and her angry look-alikes to be that party image, no matter how outrageous and disabling.

Just the other day, a congressional intern, 21, an aide to Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, a Democrat, sent an “F-bomb” sailing toward the president as he walked past her through the Capitol rotunda. She was suspended for only a week and Mrs. Hassan said she would keep her job. That’s what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called defining deviancy down.