The concept of personal responsibility is under attack.  Forces opposed to the idea that a person is responsible for his or her acts and should face their consequences have made a recent appearance on our shores.  Surprisingly, the assault comes not from the lefty pinkos who are named as the usual suspects in such attacks, but from the Right.

The Right has now come to embrace the worst sort of cultural relativism.  Its pundits and politicians attempt to explain away many of the more glaring examples of personal failure with relativist language which it once condemned.

At the top of these shameless moral relativists is one Rush Limbaugh, a righty pundit who apparently has a “radio show” where he preaches daily to “dittoheads,” persons who apparently lack the ability of thought and merely ditto their leader’s rants.

When news of the Abu Ghraib tortures first came to light, Rush told America that they should take it easy on the people who engaged in torture at the Iraqi prison.

"You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?"

According to Mr. Limbaugh’s philosophy of moral action, should a person suffer stress or emotional dissonance, striking another in one’s custody is OK.

But Rush isn’t the only person on the Right embracing the new moral relativism.  Examples of it seem to popping out all of the time.  Take, for example, the ballooning budget deficit.  Republicans are certain that despite the fact that they hold both houses of Congress and the White House, that the massive tax cuts and uncontrolled pork spending they have engaged in are not the cause of the problem.  According to President Bush, “[t]he reason we are where we are, in terms of the deficit, is because we went through a recession, we were attacked, and we're fighting a war.”   Not a mention of the huge tax cuts or spending increases.

The President seems to be involved in several of these incidents of moral relativism.  For example the so-called “Intelligence Failure of the CIA.”  According to the purveyors of this theory, President Bush was not responsible for the Iraq disaster, it was the CIA, who failed to warn him that his entire strategy in the war on terror sucked.   Had he had the good data, the theory goes, he would have never have gone to war in Iraq.  Of course the theory does not meet head on the idea that as an element of the Executive Branch, it was Bush who was responsible for making sure the CIA was doing its job.  No mention either of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the outfit responsible for most of the failed intelligence involved in the Iraq debacle.

These new moral relativists are slowly destroying the most conservative American value: personal responsibility.  Their moral relativism does not square with the noble idea that the captain, as leader of the ship, should go down with it.  The American electorate has not forgotten.