ANTIDOTE TO FRIST, MIERS AND REED

It's hard to keep up with all the corruption. The Senate majority leader's, for instance:

Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) was given considerable information about his stake in his family's hospital company, according to records that are at odds with his past statements that he did not know what was in his stock holdings.

Not to mention small-time conniving like this :

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.

Let alone the big-time corruption:

When [indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff] had to make sure his clients' concerns got the attention of the right people in the George W. Bush White House, Abramoff often turned to a longtime friend and business associate whose ties there -- especially with the President's most trusted adviser, Karl Rove -- were far better than his: former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed ... a key Bush campaign strategist ... [who] was an obliging, even eager middleman, judging by e-mail exchanges between the two ...

So maybe it's time to go to an opera. Mozart's exquisite ode to infidelity, for instance. "Opera remains an irrational art, predicated, sometimes, on happy surprises and contradictions," critic Martin Bernheimer writes in today's Financial Times. Which sounds to us like a reprieve from the irrational art of politics.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands