To put it in terms that the Vietnam War flying ace would understand, Duke Cunningham screwed the pooch.
The Republican congressman crashed and burned this week, pleading guilty to income tax evasion and to taking bribes โ about two and a half millions' worth, in goods and services, goods like a 150-year-old Louis Philippe commode, and services like $17,889.96 in repairs on a Rolls-Royce. After spending more than 14 years in Congress, he could spend up to 10 years in prison and pay a fine as big as $350,000.
The man who arrived in Congress in 1991 after beating the Democratic incumbent was an instant Capitol Hill celebrity. Congressional power-players gave him nicknames, ''Ace,'' and ''the Dukester'' โ which morphed into ''Duke-Stir,'' the name on the hull of a 42-foot yacht parked in Two-Yacht Cunningham's boat slip.
In those pre-Gingrich days, the Republicans were thrilled that a much-decorated combat pilot, the former director of the fabled Miramar Naval combat pilot school, ''Top Gun ''Cunningham himself, was in their ranks. [Only Tom Cruise didn't bask in the glow โ a Cunningham campaign brochure showing the candidate with Cruise was pulled when Cruise's agent took exception to it.]
The man Cunningham defeated was a Democrat who had been reproved by the House ethics panel and ordered to write apologies to two women staffers who complained the Congressman had sexually harassed them. Cunningham characterized the Democrat as ''a disgrace, unfit for public office.'' This week, Cunningham has used some of the same words about himself: ''โฆdisgraced my high office.''
Cunningham's flameout holds many consequences for himself, his family, his district and his party. But I think one of the most important is this:
It sets the gold standard for mea culpas.
Some spinners may regard Cunningham's tearful and forthright televised confessional as a performance for a target audience of one โ the judge who will sentence him in February.
But it may turn out that, as Malcolm said in ''Macbeth,'' ''Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.'' Cunningham's confession was a marvel of linguistic directness, of subject-predicate simplicity, of first-person singular -- ''I broke the law, concealed my conduct, and disgraced my high office.''
Hereafter, any public servant who goes down for the count will look like a weasly, mealy-mouthed fool if he is less straightforward than Cunningham.
Are you listening, Tom DeLay and company? Are you watching, Bill Frist and friends? No whining about the criminalizing of politics. No excuses, no evasions. No passive voice -- ''mistakes were made.'' No passive-aggressive ''If I did anything wrong.'' When the time comes, take your lumps. Once you start talking in indirect locutions, people will think you sound just like the man you love to hate, Bill Clinton. And for you, that would be even worse than prison.