Commentary: Give us that old-time hypocrisy. Please

WHEN George W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination in Philadelphia in 2000, the carefully crafted slogan of the moment was "compassionate conservatism," even though the party's platform was anything but.

Messages of concern for the poor, of saving the environment and for equal opportunity that flowed from the podium were meant to obscure the same-old, same-old conservative disdain for these goals. No wonder there seemed to be more people of color on the stage that week than there were black and brown delegates to listen to them. The attempt to portray the party as a "big tent" was maddening.

But it was when the Republican nominee invoked the civil rights hymn "We Shall Overcome" that the Daily News editorial board lost it. It was a charade, we wrote back then, a convention without conviction, pleasant platitudes devoid of sincerity.

Yet the viciousness of the Republican convention that adjourned Thursday night made me long for those hypocritical expressions of inclusion, of references to political opponents as "our friends across the aisle," pro forma as they might have been.

Instead, we were treated to a parade of conspiracy theorists who hinted darkly that Hillary Clinton is guilty of treason and even homicide.

A black Republican county commissioner from Colorado named Darryl Glenn offered Cosby-esque moralizing to other African-American parents and equated Black Lives Matter with anarchy. Rudy (9/11) Giuliani dismissed any concern about unequal justice being administered by police officers anywhere. The mock prosecution of Hillary Clinton by Gov. Chris Christie (the one with a half-dozen former associates who are under indictment or pleaded guilty to corruption) and the frenzied chants of "Lock her up" from the mob were unlike anything seen at other conventions. (And I thought the Band-Aids distributed at the 2004 convention to mock John Kerry's heroic military service reached new heights of despicable.)

Then there was the Trump delegate calling for Clinton to be stood up against a wall and shot for treason (a spokeswoman for the presidential candidate said they didn't agree with the sentiments, but were so thankful for his support otherwise). Another of the convention speakers, reality-TV star and underwear model Antonio Sabato, told interviewers that he is "absolutely sure" that President Obama is a Muslim with a sinister agenda. The convention had the lowest percent of African-Americans in a century (NBC put it at 18 delegates, or 0.07 percent) but never mind, said an elected member of the U.S. Congress, Rep. Steven King, of Iowa. He told a national TV audience that no other "subgroups" have done more for civilization than white people.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised when the comment section of the RNC's YouTube feed of the convention proceedings was suspended Monday night after a slew of anti-Semitic responses greeted a speaker touting outreach to Jewish voters. After a while, tweets from white supremacist supporters barely made a ripple.

I am studiously avoiding reductio ad Hitlerum here. Actually, Christie's speech was more reminiscent of Salem, Mass., in 1692. In the New Republic, author Rick Perlstein even heard echoes of the "Two Minutes' Hate" rituals required of citizens in George Orwell's 1984. Except, Christie's took a quarter hour.

Perhaps back then, I condemned hypocrisy because I didn't imagine what would happen when its veil got ripped aside and the coarse and vulgar became normal. I couldn't imagine that in 2016, Jewish reporters would be slimed online if they wrote something deemed negative about the presidential nominee. I would not have believed that Muslim children (and their bewildered friends) would worry about them being forced from their homes. Or, as Nicholas Confessore wrote in the New York Times recently, that a chant of the nominee's name ("Trump, Trump, Trump," would become an "easily understood message of racial hostility."

The boundary has been breached, though. Yet looking ahead to next week's Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, I implore the delegates and their supporters to resist replying in kind, thereby giving observers the excuse to say "both sides do it."

If that takes a nauseating dose of hypocrisy, so be it.