To understand how far to the puritanical left America has traveled since the Manhattan of 1960 depicted in AMC's Mad Man, it's worth revisiting this quote by David Frum:

They lit rockets in their backyards on the Fourth of July. They bought their steak marbled with fat. They smoked. They bought cars without seatbelts. They gave boys .22-caliber rifles for their eleventh birthdays. How they would gape and stare at a contemporary playground, with its rubber matting underneath the swings, safety belts on the teetertotters, and three-year-olds strapped into crash helmets before they can mount their tricycles. How they would snicker at grown men gird­ing themselves like test pilots to pedal through the park, at a Post Office that airbrushes the cigarette out of Humphrey Bogart’s hand lest some im­pressionable stamp-collector get the wrong idea about smoking, at the massive Range Rovers we buy so that we can commute to the office with­out fear. Back then, one did not show so much concern for one’s carcass.

Compare that quote with the videos that AMC has uploaded to promote Mad Men--there's something like a half-dozen different clips on the dangers of smoking, not counting the endless hectoring of the show's premiere episode itself. Did Basic Instinct have warnings on the health hazards of unprotected sex? Superfly or Scarface on the dangers of illegal narcotics? A Christmas Story on firearm safety? (OK, I guess the constant warnings of "You'll shoot your eye out, Ralphie!" count.)

And as Tim Blair notes, the bar has certainly been lowered in terms of scandal. Whereas Brian Jones and later Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had to consume kilos of illicit drugs in the 1960s and '70s for the police to bother with them, all it takes now is for Keith to light up a Marlboro 100 onstage, and it's truly Exile On Main Street time.