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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review June 19, 2009 / 27 Sivan 5769

Congress refines the perp walk

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Edwin Edwards - not to be confused with John Edwards - is still in prison, serving six years for taking a bribe, but John Ensign should have called him for advice before he confessed at needless length to adultery, which in certain precincts is still a more grievous crime than stealing.


Mr. Edwards, the one-time governor of the "gret stet of Louisiana," famously boasted that he would never be brought down "unless they catch me in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." That was before the feds brought him down for a crime involving only a bag of cash. Louisiana is notoriously forgiving of its politicians, in part because voters there have had a lot of practice, and in part because fun on the bayou, naughty and not, is fun: "Laissez le bon temps rouler." Let the good times roll. If the Edwards formula once worked in New Orleans, you might think it would work in Nevada, since Las Vegas is not necessarily where you should start the search if you're looking for a moral value.


More recently a junior senator from Louisiana was the object of considerable sport in his home state after his name appeared in a Washington madam's little black book. He was censured not so much for betraying his wife but that with all the talent available on Capitol Hill the senator had employed the services of a madam. Other members of Congress rarely look beyond their office suites for forbidden sweets; why should their senator be so backward in the pursuit of amours? He made the home folks look bad.


Mr. Ensign's misfortune inevitably becomes grist for the capital's gossip mills and Washington jokesmiths, such as they are. The correspondents, columnists and the freelance pundits of the blogosphere are of course shocked - shocked! - that Mr. Ensign, who scolded Bill Clinton for running a crib off the Oval Office and Sen. Larry Craig for his men's room ablutions, should have so easily succumbed to the temptations of feminine favors to which he was not entitled, either by law or moral custom. This was proof of hypocrisy, the highest crime and the most evil misdemeanor that a Washington journalist, being the closest approximation we have to a figure of perfect character and unsullied virtue, can imagine.


Washington journalists love nothing better than a scandal with a whiff of the boudoir (even if the boudoir is a men's room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport), and most of them grade on a steep curve of moral equivalence. Not everybody is an expert on politics, but everybody is an authority, if not necessarily an expert, on matters of sex.


Congressional Democrats are more likely to grant a pass for naughty conduct than Republicans. This is not necessarily driven by political ideology. Republicans are no less likely to fall to temptation, but are more likely to understand that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Republicans generally pay a dearer price to their constituents. Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Robert Livingston of Louisiana each had to give up the position of Speaker of the House when caught in embarrassing indiscretions. When Rep. Barney Frank got caught allowing his live-in male lover to run a whorehouse in their apartment, the House censured him (though calling it a "reprimand") and his constituents in starchy Massachusetts continued to return him to Washington by wide margins.


There's nothing particularly sordid in the Ensign affair. His friendship with an employee in his office developed into something more intimate while he was separated from his wife. He described what he had done, at greater length than he need have. He stood up like a man in the way that other congressional miscreants before him did not do. He did it alone; the usual congressional perp walk includes the offended wife, who tries to put a smile on a teary face and pretend eagerness to get on with a life with the man who done her wrong.


This has become an honored Washington ritual, like the grim procession to the Tyburn gallows in 17th century London, with townspeople taunting the condemned on his way to the torture of the damned. The irony is that we should expect anything better from "our only native criminal class," as Mark Twain described Congress. But Congress, after all, is only a reflection of a culture saturated by deception, knavery and violence. The popular entertainment is a catalog of sexual guile. Anything goes. A popular comedian makes a joke about the rape of a child and the national argument is not about who should horsewhip the comedian, but about whether he owed anyone an apology. We all live in Las Vegas now. Uh, not that there's anything wrong with that.

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JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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