Of Power and Abuses....

After dropping my son at his carpool this morning, I heard on NPR about Jacqui Smith, British Home Secretary, who had previously stated she would not quit over reports that she had purchased porn for her husband with public funds. I'm not an Anglophile and I think that one's taste in porn -- including, whether, what, and with whom -- is a private matter. However, hearing this brief news piece got my attention. It is not just the porn purchase...in fact, I find other expenditures of public money on private matters equally as shocking....Dog food and toothbrushes? Moat cleaning?

Jacqui Smith, like (perhaps) John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, and so many others suffer from some kind of affliction that shocks me. Whatever they do in their private lives is not my business. What I do find shocking is the use of public money for such follies. Have all these people lost their minds? Where is their sense of good judgment? Do "these people" (and by that I suppose I mean people in the public eye) come to believe that they are above the usual rules and mores which apply to the rest of us? That good sense and decent decisions do not have to be a part of their lives?

It would be easy to say that I'm just naive, that throughout the ages, across the political spectrum, there are examples of people who "do this." Newspapers and history books are replete with references to flagrant use of public money on private desires. That fact does not dim my ire. Hmm, what comes to mind is the aphorism I heard growing up: If so-and-so played on the freeway, would that make it right? The answer, of course, is that acceptance of stupid behavior doesn't make it the right course to follow.

And that, I suppose, is what bothers me about these stories: these people are stupid and arrogant...and they are the ones we choose to put in positions of power....