Anyone hearing this?

• Position: News on foreign money and election campaigns scandal is not being distributed - Column

The details of the campaign-finance scandals that have come to light during hearings before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs reveal some of the worst perversions of democracy to emerge in recent history. Yet the hearings have elicited a collective yawn from jaded Beltway insiders.

The major networks have declined to broadcast the hearings. Mainstream news magazines downplayed them. Newsweek gave the Andrew Cunanan-Gianni Versace murder story seventeen pages in its July 28 issue; the campaign-finance scandal got a scant one page. The same week, Time's ratio was sixteen-to-one. In a recent radio interview, David Brooks of the Weekly Standard summed up a common theme among Washington journalists. He claimed that Americans are so fed up with the legal fundraising practices of both parties, the question of when and where politicians cross the line into illegality is academic.

Sure, people are skeptical of money-grubbing politicians. And it's abundantly clear that it's time to reform our campaign-finance system. But the kind of paralyzing cynicism Brooks describes says more about Washington than it does about the rest of America.

Witness the reaction to Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, whose specialty has been raising millions of dollars for the Republicans -- in part by setting up a nonprofit front group called the National Policy Forum to channel funds to his party. Brooks and other commentators praised Barbour's "masterful" testimony before the Senate committee. Confronted with evidence of illegal and unethical fundraising, Barbour simply denied any wrongdoing. And if there was anything unethical in what he did, he didn't know it at the time, he added. One of Barbour's lawyers claimed admiringly that his client's performance was on a par with Oliver North's during the Iran-contra hearings. There's a telling comparison.

Washington lawyers, pundits, and politicians may not consider the recent revelations about fundraising scandals a big deal. So what if our elected officials prostitute themselves? So what if money buys political access? What else is new?

But for those of us who like to think we live in a democracy, the revelations are both outrageous and dramatic.

Among the things you're not seeing on TV: testimony about suitcases and grocery bags stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars delivered to the Democratic National Committee and the President's legal-defense fund; FBI charts that...