In 2015 news anchor Bryan Williams admitted that the story that he had told about being on a helicopter that was struck by an RPG and small arms fire was not true. He had arrived in another helicopter approximately an hour after the damaged helicopter landed.

Williams apologized, was suspended for six months by NBC, and then exiled to MSNBC.

At about the same time, Bill O’Reilly was caught in a similar situation: he claimed to have reported from the war zone in the Falkland Islands during the brief dustup between Argentina and Great Britain, when evidence, including video, showed that he was doing his reporting some 1,200 miles away from the war zone. O’Reilly claimed that everything he said was true and went on commentating for Fox.

I asked a friend of mine who is a Fox News fan why Fox didn’t discipline O’Reilly. To me it looked like the same level of offense as Williams’ helicopter story.

My friend said that the difference was that O’Reilly was an entertainer, not a journalist.

In other words, he’s not expected to speak the truth. And since he’s not expected to tell the truth, there are no consequences when he doesn’t.

I suppose that’s the reason some people can get away with a lot and others can get away with nothing. We simply don't expect any better.

I had a personal experience with that years ago when Linda and I invited a friend over for dinner. His wife was out of town, and Linda thought it would be the friendly thing to do. The friend accepted, but forgot to show up. We sat there waiting while the lasagna got cold.

Linda was understandably miffed, and we ate left over lasagna for several days, but she got over it fairly quickly because my friend was locally famous for not being anywhere on time. The word on him was that not only didn’t he wear a watch, he didn’t carry a calendar.

On the other hand, because I have a near-obsession for punctuality, I’m rarely forgiven for being even a little late.

Sometimes I envied my friend.

Now we’re back to another, much more important example of the benefits of low expectations. Throughout the primaries and the general election campaign, Donald Trump has committed gaffe after gaffe, slandering entire groups of people because of their ethnicity, religion, and sex. And he’s still standing. He blusters through another string of insults, and his supporters just shrug. The really sad thing about his memorable line about shooting someone in the middle of fifth avenue and not losing a vote is that—for a large number of Trump supporters—it's probably true.

There appears to be nothing that he can do that will alienate them. They expect no better.

Having low expectations of the man who forgot to come to dinner or of even a talking head on Fox probably isn’t dangerous, although I still think Bryan Williams got a raw deal. But that’s not the point. The point is whether we can survive actually considering someone for president for whom we have to keep lowering the bar until it can’t be lowered any more.

His latest gaffe is a 10-year-old tape of his relationship with women. He, a married man, was talking about trying to seduce a married woman. She shot him down, which is possibly a credit to her taste. He also talked about groping women and walking right up to them and kissing them. He said they’d let him do that because he was a star.

Of course, the internet went wild with some people condemning what he said and others saying that it was a private conversation, happened 10 years ago, and when men get together they talk like that.

Having been a man for a lot of years and having talked to other men, I can testify that all men don’t talk like that. I don’t. Almost none of my friends do.

But it isn’t nearly so much what he said as what it says about him. It says that he’s a privileged rich guy who believes that he can do what he wants to whomever he wants and get away with it because he’s a star. Seems that he takes that same attitude into other areas of his life, such as his dealings with vendors, reporters, or beauty queens.

The defense of Donald takes some interesting turns, most of them toward the Clintons’ reputation. Their attitude is that Bill did it; so we shouldn’t criticize Donald. Even if we were to accept that Bill Clinton is as bad as Donald Trump (which I don’t) there would still be an important flaw in that argument: we’re not being asked to vote for Bill Clinton, but for Hillary, a woman who has built a substantial body of work both with and apart from her husband.

It’s true that Donald, thrice married and an admitted adulterer, thinks that Hillary probably isn’t faithful to Bill, although he doesn’t pretend to have any evidence to support that. I believe that he simply can’t conceive of anybody being faithful and not doing whatever they want. So he assumes that Hillary Clinton is that way.

So here we are, a month before electing a president, and we’ve lowered the bar to the point that a candidate who creates sentence salads and calls them a speech, whose idea of a debate point is to call his opponent “a loser,” and who, according to his public persona, is not anyone that I would allow my daughter to date has a real possibility of being elected president.

We have dangerously lowered our expectations. And we are in danger of electing a leader who barely meets (or fails to meet) even those.