Tip Toe Through the Two Lips

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander, went on trial here on Wednesday facing a catalog of charges of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from some of the bloodiest events of the Bosnian war in the 1990s, including the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo.

The court heard a prosecutor’s dry and methodical recitation of atrocities said to have been committed by soldiers directly under Mr. Mladic’s command as Bosnian Serb units carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and, in Sarajevo, directed a “spigot of terror” that could be opened or closed at will against the civilian population.

Twenty years after the war started as the former Yugoslavia fragmented, the 11-count indictment revived memories of Europe’s worst bloodletting since World War II when Sarajevo was subjected to a 44-month campaign of sniping and shelling in which more than 10,000 people died.

In the crowded public gallery, a group of survivors from Bosnia murmured insults as Mr. Mladic appeared, with one woman shouting “vulture” as he turned to scan the crowd and gave a thumbs-up sign as he spotted an acquaintance.

… The indictment said Mr. Mladic willingly joined Serbian politicians in devising the brutal policy known as “ethnic cleansing,” when soldiers and militias swept through towns and villages in Bosnia, driving out tens of thousands of Muslim and Croat families to create lands for Serbs.

At the height of the Bosnian campaign, forces under Mr. Mladic’s command controlled nearly three quarters of Bosnia.

Mr. Mladic, who was captured in May 2011, faces two counts of genocide — one for the ethnic cleansing campaign and a second for a massacre during the war’s climax, when Mr. Mladic’s forces overran a small contingent of United Nations peacekeepers in Srebrenica. Some 8,000 unarmed men and boys were killed over several days in July 1995 in what were portrayed as acts of vengeance for Serbian deaths at the hands of Muslims.

Say what you will about Bristol Palin, she’s a quick study. It didn’t take her long to master the ways of her elders on the censorious right and decide that personal circumstance and past error needn’t prevent someone from claiming righteous leadership. Uncle Rush must be proud.

Soon after President Obama stated support for same-sex marriage, Bristol publicly weighed in. Because, you know, the world was on tenterhooks.

In a blog post she focused on the reference that Obama made to his daughters — and to the same-sex parents of some of the girls’ friends.

“It would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends (sic) parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage,” wrote Bristol, making her heady debut as the new Dr. Spock for a nascent millennium. She added that “in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.”

Fathers like … Levi Johnston? It’s with him that she conceived her child — out of wedlock, at the age of 17 — and by most accounts, his relationship with her and the Palin family isn’t any warmer than Juneau in January. A mother/father home is not what he and Bristol have succeeded in creating.

What’s more, she has made sure that their son, Tripp, will at some point be treated to a worldview-shaping image of Dad as something akin to a date rapist. That’s the description of him immortalized in her memoir, one of her many efforts to monetize her surname. It recounts the loss of her virginity as a result of getting drunk and blacking out in the company of Levi, who pounced. What a gift that narrative is to Tripp, now being hauled into a TV reality show, “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp,” already in production. Little children are known to thrive in such environments.

I hesitated before picking on Bristol because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.

But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.