One of the DVDs I got for Christmas was the Third Season of The West Wing. It’s a great show simply on dramatic and writing merits, but there are parts which are simply inspiring. One episode, “H. Con-172,” has both the Republicans and the President each performing their own class act, acts of decency and rightness. In the story, it has come out that the President has multiple sclerosis, and was hiding that fact during the first election and the first three years of his presidency. The Republicans hold hearings to skewer the president and everyone they can get their hands on, but the committee chair Bruno (James Handy) and the Republican counsel, Clifford Calley (Mark Feuerstein), generously offer Leo McGarry (whose alcoholism and prior drinking problem are about to be exposed) a way out–censure of the president. And while Leo is outraged and refuses, in the end, Bartlet accepts:

LEO: Doing this to save me the embarrassment I’ve got coming to me is about the dumbest reason I can think…

BARTLET: There’s another reason.

LEO: What?

BARTLET: I was wrong. I was. I was just…I was wrong. Come on, you know that. Lots of times we don’t know what right or wrong is but lots of times we do and come on, this is one. I may not have had sinister intent at the outset but there were plenty of opportunities for me to make it right. No one in government takes responsibility for anything anymore. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalize. “Everybody does it.” That’s what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone’s to blame so no one’s guilty. I’m to blame. I was wrong.

So often, you watch this show and think, man, that is really the way government ought to be run.

But you know it’s not. Neither side. But we should start taking lessons.