Some old wise man — I think it was Joe Pyne — once said that the real scandal in government wasn't about what laws were being broken but what you can get away with without breaking any laws. As this article in the Washington Post notes, there's an awful lot that lobbyists can do to bestow presents and perks on our legislators without violating a single statute.
I suspect everyone reading this would agree that it's possible for something to be immoral or unethical but technically legal. Some would say that performing abortions is immoral even though it's legal. Others would say that a C.E.O. draining his employees' pension fund is unethical even though it's legal. And yet, in the partisan bickering that's getting worse and worse, this principle is largely being trampled into oblivion. A lot of Karl Rove's defenders are contending that no law was broken…so, end of argument. Champions of the Clintons have trod the same ground in the past: No one was indicted; ergo, the actions were honorable. Well…maybe, maybe not.
I don't even believe that not being indicted or convicted means that no law was broken. A very small percentage of all murders are ever prosecuted in this country. That doesn't mean no one should have gone to prison for them. The case just couldn't be proved. A lot of white collar and political crimes aren't prosecuted due to which party controls the office of the prosecutor at any given moment. We might well be in the midst of impeachment-related hearings right now if all the same things had transpired in Washington the last few years except that the Democrats had control of Congress.
Read the Post article. A lot of those things aren't illegal but should be. That's where our outrage should begin…not when the law is violated but, at times, when it isn't. And by the way, I was just kidding about Joe Pyne being wise.