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"  You may have noticed, but political courage ain&amp;#039;t what it used to be. We are not that far away from the 40th anniversary of the Saturday Night Massacre, in which the attorney-general and his assistant quit rather than follow a criminal president&amp;#039;s order to fire the prosecutor who was busily proving what a big honking criminal the president actually was. You will note that they quit on the spot. They didn&amp;#039;t fire the prosecutor and then go on cable teevee five years later to say how sorry they were to have made the mistake, and they didn&amp;#039;t publish a forelock-tugging memoir a decade down the line asking the country to forgive the damage they did. That&amp;#039;s for the politicians we have today, for whom having the cake and eating it, too, has become a steady diet. We&amp;#039;ve seen a lot of this with the Iraq War, most conspicuously with Colin Powell and his endlessly contrite former gunsel, Lawrence Wilkerson, but also with a whole host of pols and pundits and think-tank jamokes who would still be calling the rest of us traitors and fifth-columnists -- Hi, Andrew! \u2014 if their pet war hadn&amp;#039;t gone so horribly wrong, and if the people whom they ridiculed and marginalized hadn&amp;#039;t been so right about everything. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty long-winded way to say that David Frum can pretty much blow me. This latter is summed up by international man of mystery, Richard Cohen, who famously explained: I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term.  What do you mean &amp;quot;us,&amp;quot; white eyes? There were 150,000 people in the street one day who were right, and this is what Richard Cohen said about the situation: On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing -- the fighting -- were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.  Therapeutic. Damn, that&amp;#039;s some stupid right there. The latest is Bill Clinton, who&amp;#039;s dreadfully sorry to have signed the discriminatory Defense Of Marriage Act, and says so in The Washington Post today. When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that &amp;quot;enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.&amp;quot; Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned. We are still a young country, and many of our landmark civil rights decisions are fresh enough that the voices of their champions still echo, even as the world that preceded them becomes less and less familiar. We have yet to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, but a society that denied women the vote would seem to us now not unusual or old-fashioned but alien. I believe that in 2013 DOMA and opposition to marriage equality are vestiges of just such an unfamiliar society. Please to be giving me a break. DOMA was discriminatory 17 years ago. It was unconstitutional 17 years ago. It was an offense against human dignity 17 years ago. And Bill Clinton signed it simply to help himself defeat the pathetic candidacy of Robert Dole. (Let&amp;#039;s not even get into the welfare &amp;quot;reform&amp;quot; bill he signed for the same reason.) Plessy v. Ferguson was a disgrace long before it was overturned, and overturning it when we finally got around to it didn&amp;#039;t mean the Court&amp;#039;s decision wasn&amp;#039;t disgraceful at the time. An age of retroactive contrition is pale courage in a self-governing republic. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20409/bill-clinton-defense-of-marriage-act-030813/>