Ted Stevens' conviction

Ted Stevens is one GOP senator I certainly won't miss. The Washington Post points out the pettiness of the gifts that Stevens has been convicted of accepting.

The amount of freebies that Mr. Stevens accepted to renovate his Alaska "chalet" is significant, but the individual components -- a Viking grill, a vibrating Shiatsu massage lounger, a five-foot steel sculpture of migrating salmon -- underscore the petty needlessness of Mr. Stevens's crime.

It brings to mind one of the great lines that Sir Thomas More speaks in A Man for All Seasons.

Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?

Senator Stevens, you gave up your integrity for a Shiatsu massage lounger?

On a partisan note, Senator Stevens harmed not only his personal reputation, but his party, by not resigning from the Senate and his reelection race as soon as he was indicted so that a Republican could run and try to keep the seat. Stevens only seemed to care about himself and not his state or what he has said he believes in.

This trial, along with the convictions of other Republicans in the past few years, also demonstrates that a Republican-led Department of Justice can go after prominent Republicans.

As the Post points out, what his fate demonstrates is how corrupting the many years in Washington can be for some of these guys.

There is a larger lesson in the Stevens prosecution, which is the sense of entitlement to which public officials can fall prey and, perhaps among the most powerful, a sense of imperviousness to the ordinary rules. After all, they may tell themselves, they work long hours for far less money than they could make in the private sector. After all, they have done so much for their constituents. After all, these are gifts from a friend. This is a mind-set that has been on sad display all too often in Washington in recent years, and, in truth, it is something that not even the most stringent ethics laws can fully protect against. Those who are determined to cheat the system by improperly accepting gifts and failing to report them must realize, as a spate of public corruption prosecutions has proved, that what they may justify to themselves as penny ante is in fact criminal. Mr. Stevens worked to give so much to his state, but he forgot the most important duty he owed its citizens: honest service.

Clearly, most public servants aren't out for all the Viking grills that they can get, but those who do succumb deserve the full opprobrium of the voters.