Sunday, January 07, 2007

But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game


I found the cutest letter today in the LATimes, from a guy who clearly lives in Camelot. Or Xanadu. Or Somewhere Over The Rainbow, where life is perfect:
This current noise about Pelosi's determination to bring ethics reform to the House is, when you poke beneath the surface, totally laughable.

I expect this ethics reform to last maybe a couple of weeks, and then it will be the same old dirty business by the Democrats that the Republicans honed so well. You can change a person's clothes, but you don't change the body inside the clothes.

Why doesn't someone ask why grown men and women, supposedly mature, elected to national office, need to create an institutional set of ethical rules to govern themselves with integrity?

Why wasn't their ethical sense already built into them in childhood?

If this weren't so disgustingly tragic, it would be utterly hilarious.

So the nation observes these moral infants scurrying around trying to find a way to keep their colleagues' hands out of the cookie jar. It's no wonder that the general public regards the ethics of our congressional members as ranking somewhere between used car salesmen and card sharks at the casino.

Dude, let me explain: See, not everyone shares your high sense of morals and ethics. And not everyone was raised right. That's why we have laws. And rules about stuff.

I'm sure Jack Abramoff was raised in a good home, and probably Duke Cunningham too. And maybe even Tom DeLay. And I'm pretty sure that Oliver North, and Richard Nixon, and even G. Gordon Liddy were schooled in ethics and propriety. But here's the thing:

They all were and are crooks!

They broke the law, and in most cases were punished. Well, not really in Nixon's and North's cases, bastards.

So, my friend of the high-minded virtue, we have laws because folks will break them and need to be punished. Sorry to disappoint you, but that's just the way it goes.

Deal.

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