Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist seems to be the latest to succumb to a dread and sometimes fatal condition. No, I’m not talking about avian bird flu, but rather an ailment that tends to focus on the political classes, worsens in the presence of power and can occasionally be politically fatal.
I call it “rectitudinal hubris.” Its symptoms include a politician’s being so certain of their own moral rectitude – so sure that their cause is morally justified – that they stop worrying about the ethics constraints that were enacted to keep mere mortals from abusing their positions.
The condition has already send Tom DeLay into political quarantine. And Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating a potential outbreak at the White House. (The Harriet Miers nomination seems less a case of rectitudinal hubris and more one of plain old hubris.)
How else to explain Frist? Today’s Washington Post reports that Frist has been subpoenaed by the Securities and Exchange Commission over his potential insider trading and other potentially unethical business dealings with his family (and while acknowledging contacts with the SEC, Frist’s flaks didn’t bother mentioning that documents had been requested – not a lie of commission, perhaps, but almost certainly one of omission). Frist reportedly held a great deal of stock in his family’s hospital chain independent of his blind trust – the same one he said protected him from ethical conflicts, but which he cleared out (conveniently, weeks before the stock in the trust took a tumble) so as to avoid those same ethical problems that he said he didn’t have.
“This shows Senator Frist’s capacity for clumsiness and bad timing,” GOP ethics lawyer Jan Baran understated to the Post.
So it seems that either the Senate majority leader is an idiot … or suffering from a worsening case of rectitudinal hubris. Is there a cure? Top scientists are still looking.