The great word in ethics is ought . History is about what was , journalism about what is , law about what must be , futurism about what will be .
Ethics is about what ought to be .
That helps explain how, in his January 20th pardon of fugitive financiers Marc Rich and Pincus Green, former president Bill Clinton appears to have stained his legacy, perhaps irrevocably, across a huge bipartisan swath of the U.S. public. The Beltway-insider analysis is that he lost his spinning machine when he left the White House. After January 20, he had no publicity pro to craft clever retorts, no praetorian opinion guard to strike back instantly whenever he was attacked, no penumbra of friends to spring to his defense. So the public had to wait four weeks to hear an explanation of the pardon, which finally came in a piece Clinton wrote in the New York Times this past Sunday. But there's more here than a failure of spin, I think.