Mark Steyn‘s National Review cover story on Newt Gingrich includes the following excerpt, applicable to anyone who has ever gone to Washington to do good and ended up doing well:

Perhaps the single most repellent feature of the political class that has served America so disastrously in recent decades is its shameless venality in parlaying “public service” into a guarantee of an eternal snout at the trough. Newt writes bestselling books about government, produces DVDs about government, sets up websites about government, but he is as foreign to genuine private-sector wealth creation as any life politician. Indeed, his endurance in Washington represents one of the worst aspects of contemporary “public service” — that a life in politics no longer depends on anything so whimsical as the votes of the people.