America's New Normal: Shabby, Shoddy, and Shifty

In the long gone nation in which I grew up, I learned that in tennis, for example, one must always call for one's opponents any opponent's shot that lands close enough to the line to be debatable.  That of course was in sports before sports were displaced by big money athletic competitions that have nothing about them that is sporting, let alone gracious or even civil.

With bushels of dollars at stake, it's not surprising that we now have football teams trying to steal each others signals and monkeying with equipment to secure advantages, baseball players and boxers taking performance enhancing drugs, educators  falsifying test scores of students the educators have failed to teach, journalice disseminating information they know to be false, and so on.  The list goes on and on.

So it's no wonder that we now have and widely admire the nation's first fully-integrated self-contained public crime family -- the shady and evasive team of Bill and Hillary. 

Jovial and friendly Bill is the public face, joshing between the dots as he brazenly challenges anyone to try to connect them with enough evidence to prove criminal wrong doing.  His good humor is based on confidence that the media will help ensure that he and Hillary will remain above the law that applies to lesser mortals.  He is trotted out whenever there is a need to charmingly distract attention from the obvious fact that here is nothing good natured or friendly about Hillary.  She clearly is a coldly calculating, mean spirited, grasping and self-aggrandizing shrew.  But Bill's diversionary efforts always work until the obvious corruption is old news and therefore not news at all.  As a couple they constantly hungrily feed their respective insatiable appetites -- empty suit Bill for public acceptance, approval, and adulation, and voracious Hillary for money and power.

Such shameless leadership does serve a couple of purposes.  In addition to serving as exemplars on whom pond scum can look down
such leaders provide fresh evidence of the accuracy of the adage that scum rises to the top of every rain barrel.

But with such examples at the top, how can we expect our young people not to lie, cheat, and steal at every opportunity?  And what about the future of our country with a government designed to function properly only with virtuous leaders selected and overseen by a virtuous citizenry?