Alberto Gonzales may not be smart enough to realize the extent of his disgrace. He is not one of those politicians who, after years of honorable government service, makes a mistake and then pays for it. That was the case of Clark Clifford, whose service to Harry Truman was not besmirched by the fact that he got involved in financial shenanigans very late in his life. That was also the case with Dan Rostenkowski, who was brought down for putting his hand in the cookie jar in a way that, up to that time, bordered on being a customary perk: cashing in on postal stamps. For this you bring down a Speaker? Nor is Gonzales' shortcoming that he was an out and out crook, like Spiro Agnew. Rather, what he did was to undermine the credibility of the Justice Department through making it an arm of the political office of the White House. That, in addition to his other deeds, which was to justify and cover up wartime surveillance of citizens and the torture of detainees, and to lie repeatedly to Congress about both matters, puts him right up there with Aaron Burr, who may or may not have instigated an attempt at rebellion on the part of what were then the new western states in the Union, and Joe McCarthy, who spread fear among the citizenry in the name of defending the same principle that Gonzales defends: national security as an excuse for anything and everything. Sure, there were enablers along the way with all of these people, the President and Rumsfeld among those playing that role for Gonzales. That does not make Gonzales any the less culpable in the history books. I can see a set of door magnets of great villains in American history, and he will be one of them. (Earl Warren, who interned the Japanese, would belong to that list if he hadn't rehabilitated himself when he got on the Supreme Court. So you can turn a bad story by giving it a good end as well as at least partially turn a good story by giving it a bad end, but there is no release from a bad reputation if you are bad all along the way, which was the case with Burr and McCarthy and now with Gonzales and, I daresay, with George Bush himself.)

A true conservative I know said to me the other day that Lisa Marie Nowak, the woman astronaut who drove from Houston to Cape Canaveral to harass, at the least, her lover's new girl friend, was a disgrace to NASA, the military, and to the United States. I, on the other hand, think she only revealed that astronauts, male or female, are subject to the same foibles as anyone else, weaknesses of the flesh fairly low on my list of sins. For me, what Gonzales and his kind do is far worse. The President is the greatest disgrace the country at the moment has to bear, a far greater disgrace than a philandering astronaut, because his policies not only kill people but threaten the entire posture of the American nation.

I don't think that the difference between the perception of a particular conservative and my own perception of the relative effrontery of Bush and Nowak is idiosyncratic or just too quaint a comparison to take seriously. I think this comparison gets to the heart of why liberals and conservatives speak past one another whether or not they agree or converge on the war or one or another piece of social legislation. A conservative respects the idea of deviance, understanding the things that are truly deviant don't have to do with minority positions on social issues, but rather with matters that attack our idea of what it is to be a member of humankind. Sex issues are very real and paramount because they strike you as being at the foundation of what any society is about. Principles of taxation are not so sacrosanct because you can always trim those to suit a constituency. It would seem harder to trim a position on abortion, though there are a goodly number of conservatives who are trying, and it would be a partial disproof of my theory, one not easily explained away, if Giuliani got the Republican nomination.

Moreover, you can think foolish the politician across the aisle that supports Social Security as it, however exasperating it is to contemplate a politician given over to a policy that, you believe, would undercut the economic foundations of the nation, and so is ever trying the limits of your patience and your tolerance for political disagreement. That person may nonetheless be honorable, in that they lead an exemplary personal life or, if they do not, as is the case with Teddy Kennedy, are stricken with bouts of remorse and have paid a price in reputation and grief for their personal failings. So Orrin Hatch or a Lubavicher rabbi can feel sympathy for an addict and an ex-addict. Liberals, on the other hand, think that failings in public office are worse than failings in private life. You can't get away with praising Strom Thurmond, even when everyone knows he is on his last legs. Conservatives shouldn’t weep their crocodile tears for Katrina victims if they support the Administration that sent Brownie into New Orleans and Bremer into Iraq, though Liberals may remark of you that you know not what you do, are incapable of seeing how human suffering is tied to political issues.

The liberal view is very harsh because it requires people to be competent in their offices rather than just diligent or well meaning in their private lives. The liberal view is, perhaps, a distillation of a sociological view that holds people accountable for the consequences of their actions and not just for the intentions of their actions, though usually intentions and consequences go together because the important consequences of policies proposed or enacted are not as unanticipated as the sociologist Robert Merton thought when he popularized the phrase “unanticipated consequences of social action”-- or at least as much so as those who nowadays invoke that phrase presume them to be. Those who propose the privatization of Social Security know full well that it means the eventual end of Social Security, and they regard that as a good thing.

The liberal view can be faulted in another way. It bleeds over into a radical view whereby we are nothing but the consequences of our actions. Old Bolsheviks confess to crimes they didn't commit because the consequences of their beliefs are "objectively" ruinous to a Soviet state. But the conservative view, supposedly sensitive to the facts of everyday life rather than to the ins and outs of thinking about policy, falls into the same lack of thoughtfulness about social policy that it visits upon personal failings. I am sick of conservatives getting their rocks off over child abusers. It is a terrible crime and those who perpetrate it are not likely to be cured of the illness that propels them into committing it. It is a crime that I do not know how to eliminate, though I do know how to significantly reduce deaths on the highway: provide mass transit. A conservative does not see how the two can be compared. The first is a violation of a basic foundation of human decency, what separates us from the animals, and not a problem incident on our nation being an advanced industrial society. To the liberal, both issues are social problems and so to be dealt with in the policy planner’s tone of voice. I am not sure you can even raise the question of whether child abuse is a social problem without getting outrage from across the aisle.

Notwithstanding what the President said, Gonzales is not a man of “integrity, decency, principle”. Which is not to say that Gonzales is a child abuser. What he did is, to the liberal mind, worse. What he did was to abuse the nation.