THIS IS MORIBUND, THE BURGERMEISTER, I’M GONNA KEEP THIS MONSTER DOWN.

Shot: “The Cologne police added that they had received 90 complaints from victims, including one who said she had been raped. No arrests have been made. In Hamburg, the police said 10 women had reported that they were sexually assaulted and robbed in a similar fashion on the same night.”

—“Reports of Attacks on Women in Germany Heighten Tension Over Migrants,” the New York Times, January. 5, 2016.

Chaser: “Hamburg bans [single use] coffee pods in state-run buildings.”

—Digital Journal, February 21st, 2016.

Back in early 2011, when New York City was hip deep in a foot and a half or more of white powdery global warming (no doubt it was all Keurig’s fault) and snow removal was spotty at best and nonexistent at worst, Victor Davis Hanson coined “The Bloomberg Syndrome:”

It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.

The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.

Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.

Since political correctness was born in Europe nearly a century ago, the contagion is far worse there than it’s infected America, though it’s spreading rapidly here as well. (See also: most college campuses, New York, and San Francisco.) But as Glenn recently noted, “Virtue-signaling is not a policy…Virtue-signaling is never about real world consequences. And the more people virtue-signal, the less virtuous they tend to be.”