A wise person knows that extreme likeability — especially in a person who wants something from you — can be a red flag. For an honest, sincere person will sometimes tell you things you don’t want to hear; he’ll sometimes be grumpy and let it show. And if he gets by on anything, it’s virtue. But the con man isn’t selling virtue; the only way he can get by (or get over) is with a pleasing façade, which will be maintained at least until the point he no longer needs you. In certain cases, this point is the next election.

Unprecedented school-lunch regulations have just gone into effect, and they suggest a new answer to the question “Where’s the beef?”: not on students’ plates — or on their bones. The regulations are a result of Michelle Obama’s “Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act,” and the result has been wasted food, endangered health, and hungrier kids.

Evident in Olympic rule application is something I wrote about mere days ago: the triumph of Muslim absolutism over Western relativism. Whether Muslims are right or wrong in a given instance, they’re sure of themselves in every instance. They don’t capitulate, waver, or apologize. They’re brazen. And Westerners? They’re craven. Even the values they profess most — brotherhood, tolerance, sensitivity, open-mindedness, antipathy for discrimination — are situational. Like athletes, these values are subject to expulsion when inconvenient.

Liberals are no strangers to using children to relate political messages, as the 2008 videos of kids singing for and paying homage to Obama prove. And conservatives certainly complained — about brainwashing and using children. Yet I don’t remember any of them wishing that they could snuff the life out of the youngsters. Heck, I can’t even recall any who wished death upon the adults manipulating the kids. That’s a brand of bloodthirsty rage confined, seemingly, to the Left.

Conservatism is defensive in nature, being concerned with conserving the status quo, but never builds its ramparts high enough to be unscalable or wields its sword boldly enough to slay those who would breach its walls. Liberals ever return to the bargaining table asking for more laws, mandates, regulations or programs, and conservatives are always “reasonable.” And the end result is inevitable: After enough time, the Left has everything it wants.

When people such as Emanuel and Moreno call Chick-Fil-A and its defenders intolerant, consider something. Chick-Fil-A is a family-owned business informed by biblical values, yet it serves homosexual customers. It doesn’t refuse to hire homosexual employees. And, despite its willingness to sacrifice prosperity for principle (all its restaurants are closed Sundays), it’ll still do business in cities that have rubber-stamped faux marriage. On the other hand, many liberals would deny traditionalists the right to do business simply because they disagree with the leftist agenda.

We may never know what was going though Aurora shooter James Holmes’s mind when he committed his heinous mass murder. We don’t know what kind of psychosis or precisely what evil influences he might have been subject to. What we do know is that, in wanting to be the Joker and not Batman, the villainous and not the virtuous, he reflects something prevalent today: The romanticizing of evil.

We expect anti-gun nonsense from people such as Bill Moyers and Little Big Gulp Bloomberg, but we might hope that Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly wouldn’t evoke an eye-rolling “Oh, really!” when discussing the subject. But as the crusty commentator further proved last night while arguing with a guest, Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), he still hasn’t done his homework on the firearms issue.

Harming Penn State University's football program does nothing to advance justice. It simply means that the NCAA is going to punish a large number of people, such as the players involved in the program, the new coaches, and students and others who have an emotional or even financial vested interest in the program’s health, who had nothing to do with the child sex-abuse scandal.

Fairness is ensured only when we recognize and apply eternal principles. More and more, however, they — and even obvious physical reality — are denied in the name of political correctness and what feels right.