Thomas Sowell has hit on a point relating to the Scooter Libby trial that has been missed by most other commentators but which may be more important than what the others are talking about. Sowell asks:
"More important, how are we to expect highly qualified people, with far better options than a government job, to risk being put through the Washington meatgrinder because of politics, media hype and special prosecutors who can create crimes in the course of an investigation, when there was none to begin with?"
Some will say that this is not a problem, that there is no shortage of people wanting to go to Washington. That may be true, but are they the people we want in Washington? Does the viciousness, the meanness, the criminalization of life in Washington, mean that the best people, the people who can do something else, will stay away? Will our Washingtons and Adamses and Jeffersons come to government today or will they stay away, to protect themselves and their families?
It used to be our leaders would pledge their sacred honor. Now it is taken from them by a politics of personal destruction, a politics that admits of no honest disagreement. Today’s politics of morality seems to mean calling those you disagree immoral, instead of being moral yourself.
If we want good people in Washington, we need to make Washington a place good people are willing to go. That means we must ratchet down our disagreements. We cannot expect good people to go to Washington if we call them bad or evil just because they disagree with us. In other words, to get good people to go to Washington, we have to treat them as we would want to be treated ourselves.
-------------------- Update (3/13/07, 12:45 p.m.): Not everybody follows this approach. One presidential candidate recently stated their approach in Des Moines: "When you're attacked, you have to deck your opponent." This person also said the following when some members of the other party were invited to a meeting: "What are you doing inviting those people … ? These people are our enemies. They are trying to destroy us."
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