When I was growing up in Los Angeles, there was a man named Baldo Kristovich, who was County Administrator when I was a young clerk in Exec, Asst. Vincent Bugliosi’s DA’s office.

Kristovich was accused, then convicted and shamed from office over a matter of a few dollars. In retrospect (that was 1972), it was nothing.

But then, in the 1990s, my favorite US Senator of the 20th Century, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote a great book, which was perhaps his twelfth, “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which he elucidated how corruption is dismissed easily in our modern times.

These crooks—Kriss, Ryan, et al—would be sentenced to prison in our good old days. They are reminders of Dan Rostenkowski, Bobby Baker, and all the slime of our past in American politics. They are fallow human characters in our modern American drama.