And it's off to Argentina.

It all makes great theater, of course -- top entertainment. Sanford, Edwards, Jackson -- what fun to ogle, to point, to carp, to harp. They're all so -- you know -- much more than we are.

How odd. The science of government is the science of ordering our public lives according to tested assumptions about justice and prudence. We're not talking about that now, are we?

It's possible always for public men and women to engage in politics, so conceived. It's also rarer and rarer, as political obsessions take over the whole of life. The power to give us joy -- as entertainment does -- is supposedly the power that politics exercises. Yet look at what the general run of politicians nowadays offers: cheap and unlimited health care, financial security, a chicken in every pot, joy and satisfaction of just about every sort. By law!

The founders were a bit more modest in their intentions. The security of the nation, the freedom to excel -- or not excel, the security of contracts -- not much more than that was on offer at the start. It sufficed for a while under Mr. Washington, Mr. Adams, Mr. Jefferson. The end to politics of that limited nature came gradually, then fast, faster, fastest, like a locomotive engine gathering power.

The key word is "power." You get it, in our modern human arrangement, by promising higher and higher levels of joy and satisfaction, rather than pledging to create conditions under which human beings, generally, can shape for themselves the small and large satisfactions that make one glad to live in a place of freedom.

"Entertaining" our politicians certainly are, in the Michael Jackson-Mark Sanford sense. Laugh while you can. The joke seems to get less funny every minute.