A person's principles can come from many sources. Parents, friends, education, experience, and especially one's system of belief. There are many different and wholly acceptable ways for a person to believe that will have a positive effect on society.

Politics, by way of contrast, generally means compromise, as in trying to find a middle ground that is acceptable by two or more sides in creating a general policy and sometimes defining the law under which we all live.

Are these two disparate concepts able to work together without the principles being compromised? If the federal government is any indication, not very well. I am not saying that every government employee and politician is a person of low principles. Not at all.

What I am trying to understand is how a person who believes he or she knows right from wrong and participates in a belief system that gives strong moral guidelines can work in a political system that asks, nay demands, that those very principles be put upon a shelf to achieve a specific end result?

If there are such things as moral absolutes, wouldn't there be a conflict somewhere? Can a moral man or woman be a successful politician while still being true to his or her core beliefs?

Once upon a time, there was a distinction between a politician and a Statesman, the latter being someone who didn't budge on certain questions of character in his office. That word hasn't been used in quite a while and, sadly, there has been a dearth of Statesmen and women in office.

Perhaps that lack of leadership by example is one of the reasons that there has been unprincipled partisan politicking in Washington and the state capitols over the past few decades. Look at this current presidential campaign. Both sides are slinging mud at each other in hopes that we the electorate are not going to notice their warts and imperfections, much less their lack of moral character. There is no shortage of petty mudslinging by the electorate, either.

Hasn't the time arrived when we should be demanding of our politicians the same exact thing a morally-prosperous country should be demanding of ourselves? Or are we truly at the end of the road for principled Constitutional republicanism?

I am the eternal optimist, but even I am at the point where I need to put on a Hazmat suit on election day before casting my ballot and that is just wrong.