Finding What’s Right In All That’s Wrong

The children look at us with their deceptively innocent eyes and ask: In this month’s accusations of ethical lapses and moral squalor, whom and what can we believe in?

The U.S. Supreme Court hearing on a citizen’s right to bring a civil case against a sitting president exposes the hypocrisy of feminists who were prepared to sacrifice the principle of sexual harassment on the altar of political favoritism.

While oral arguments took place in court Monday, Congress was embroiled, across the street, in the ethics of using illegal eavesdropping to besmear the defense against charges of ethical violations by the speaker of the House of Representatives.

As if this wrong committed by Democrats in the cause of righting a wrong committed by the Republican speaker were not enough, the media are asking themselves: Was it wrong for some journalists to be intimidated by a White House counsel’s “report” claiming that pursuit of Clinton administration scandals is a sinister plot by right-wing kooks? And this is only the tip of the titanic ethical-moral-legal iceberg.

Soon, the independent counsel will present evidence of wrongdoing in regard to Whitewater, Travelgate and the rape of privacy in the FBI’s files. At the same time, Congress will hold hearings on the sale of influence to Asian business and political interests by a shameless Democratic presidential campaign team and Clinton’s legal defenders.

What are we to tell impressionable innocents of this march of feet of clay? Who can assure them anybody has clean hands?

They wonder: If the question-ducking president and the corner-cutting speaker and the eavesdropping ethicists and the self-hating media all are begrimed with guilt, where can they turn for inspirational uplift?

Youthful idealists, you have come to the right space. Here we deal in eternal verities unsullied by pragmatism’s shades of gray.

In matters of morality, these are wrongs: It is wrong to use the power of position to extract sexual favors just as it is wrong to make such a charge falsely.

It is wrong to besmear and humiliate an accuser, just as it is wrong for an accuser to denounce an examination of her motive.

And it is wrong to give anyone, even a president, permanent immunity from the civil law, just as it is wrong to deny a president respite from lawsuits while in office and wrong to deny the collection of perishable evidence to be used when it is ordinary citizen against ordinary citizen.

In matters of ethics, these are wrongs:

It is wrong to use tax-exempt money to support political activity, and it is wrong to mislead investigators about it, although an unintended untruth is less wrong than a deliberate lie.

It is wrong for government to enjoy the fruit of a poisoned tree - to use a tape recording obtained by invaders of privacy to increase the punishment of an admitted wrongdoer - because unethical means do not serve ethical ends.

And it is wrong for a White House counsel to spend taxpayer dollars to sell gullible journalists a 2-inch-thick conspiracy theory about conspiracy theorists. It is more wrong for a lawyer paid by the people to abuse the claim of “executive privilege” for thousands of documents, some of which turn out to show wrongdoing by presidential aides.

It is almost always wrong to break the law. It is wrong to abuse the police power to make places for cronies, wrong to deceive bank examiners and federal agencies, wrong to call up a thousand FBI files for political snooping, wrong to turn a blind eye to the use of foreign fronts in illegal campaign donations.

What’s left to be right?

It is right for a people to have a rule of law that can - and, in our time, more often does - call the most powerful and arrogant to account.

It is right to have an imperfect, impatient, sometimes bamboozled press with the power to prod the amazingly effective system of checks and balances into doing its constitutional duty.

What, then, do we tell children, disillusioned by scandal all around, on the eve of the second inauguration of a Democratic president and a Republican Congress?

We tell them to thank their stars for the freedom to muckrake. And we tell them to look up from the necessary mutual muckraking now and then to marvel at democracy’s celestial crown.

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