But what they have experienced is not the death of decency so much as the birth of political wisdom. Politics is ill-suited for the business of distributing compassion or virtue. Unlike men and women of the cloth, who merely can extol the wonders of righteousness, lawmakers can decide which transgressions to punish, and how. Human nature being what it is, people who possess the power to punish eventually will abuse it. To take some recent examples, Atty.
People rightly fear anybody who aspires to use government as an instrument of universal salvation.
As much as Republicans hoped to cast the president's trial as a moral drama, it unfolded as a test of political wills. The White House and disciplined Democrats maintained that Kenneth Starr was a partisan Peeping Tom and that the scandal was just about sex. Of course, the controversy was about sex. The perjury was about sex. The obstruction was about sex.