Situational morality

Washington Post, June 18: Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., held a news conference this week to admit that he had an affair with a campaign worker.

Mr. Ensign said he remains committed to serving in the Senate, although he did resign a GOP leadership post.

We couldn’t help but contrast Mr. Ensign’s contrition with his bombast in calling on President Bill Clinton to resign after the disclosure of Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Or his aggressive, but unsuccessful, campaign to get then-Sen. Larry E. Craig, R-Idaho, to resign following his arrest in an airport bathroom sex sting. But then, a certain relativism in worldview is nothing new for the Nevada senator.

Mr. Ensign, you see, is the senator who attached to the D.C. voting rights bill a noxious amendment that would strip the District of Columbia of the right to write its own gun laws. He would never, in a million years, strip Nevada officials of their right to write local laws or in any other way visit upon them so extreme a sovereignty-stripping measure. But then, what works for Mr. Ensign at any given moment is the only thing that seems to matter.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 17: Four weeks after US Airways Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III and First Officer Jeffrey B. Skiles calmly landed an Airbus 320 in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, all 49 passengers and crew aboard a Continental Express flight were killed when their turboprop airliner crashed outside Buffalo, N.Y. One man on the ground also was killed.

Separate hearings in Washington last week suggested that the different outcomes of the two flights may have been a direct result of the training and experience of the cockpit crews.

At a hearing Wednesday of a Senate Commerce subcommittee, Mark Rosenker, the acting chairman of the NTSB, said that three years ago the NTSB had suggested making it mandatory that airlines review FAA test records before hiring pilots. Instead the FAA chose to make it optional.

The free-market approach to regulation – of food safety, of financial markets, of airline safety and dozens of other parts of American life – has been an abysmal and sometimes deadly failure. Try not to think about that next time you board an airplane.