MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has all sorts of red flags in his resume. He went to Harvard for one thing, and describes himself as a “European socialist.” At Harvard you can’t major in journalism: you work on the daily paper, The Crimson. O’Donnell didn’t do that: he wrote for the fake news satirical student publication, the Lampoon. O’Donnell became an openly biased and agenda-driven MSNBC news anchor by making TV contacts while writing scripts for TV’s imaginary leftist nirvana White House fantasy, “The West Wing.” Later he was Keith Olberman’s stand-in on MSNBC, which should tell you all you need to know.

And yet…much as I fart in his general direction, as he personifies just how vile MSNBC is and just how self-lobotomizing anyone is who uses it to get their “news,” I am shocked at the degraded character and shame-free embrace of ethical relativism O’Donnell displayed yesterday.

The big news coming out of the “Get Trump!” fiasco in Manhattan was that the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen, already a disbarred lawyer and a convicted perjurer, further enhanced his credibility by admitting that he had stolen $30,000 from his employer and client, Donald Trump. Here is how O’Donnell described it:

“It did not really sound like stealing $30,000. It sounded a lot like Michael Cohen doing the little that he could within that calculation to rebalance the bonus he thought he deserved, and it still came out as less than the bonus he thought he deserved and the bonus he had gotten the year before.”

Nice. This statement, in a sane world and on any responsible news network, would instantly disqualify the speaker from ever being taken seriously again. I once had an employee who used her company credit card for non-business expenses. When, after I fired her, I demanded that the money be returned, she refused, so my organization, a non-profit health care promotion group, sued her in small claims court. Her argument before the judge was that she was only taking the money she felt she was entitled to after I had declined to give her the raise she asked for. Let’s call it the O’Donnell Defense.

The judge was incredulous. She told my crooked fundraiser that a 10-year-old should know that was never an excuse for theft, and ordered her to pay back the funds.

The degree of Trump-Derangement and partisanship-driven ethics rot one can see almost every minute on MSNBC is remarkable, but O’Donnell’s promotion of the hoariest of all rationalizations for thievery is stunning even in that context. Cohen’s justification for his theft, endorsed by O’Donnell, is an unholy mating of Rationalization 11A, “I deserve this!” or “Just this once!” and #2A, Sicilian Ethics, or “They had it coming.” To the now almost fully totalitarian and Machiavellian tilting Axis of Unethical Conduct of which O’Donnell is an especially disgusting agent, any action no matter how unethical, illegal or unconstitutional taken against Donald Trump is justified.

It is worse than that, however. How many of the dim bulbs and ethics-challenged watching this Pravda-emulating news source heard O’Donnell justify theft and thought, “Hey! I never thought about it that way!”? (If you aren’t dim and ethics-challenged when you start watching MSNBC, you soon will be.)

Thus do ethics corrupters make American society dysfunctional, ugly and dangerous.