Jul. 11--I recently ran into an old and close friend, the kind who's in that tiny handful of friends you can be away from for years at a time, and when you run into them again you pick up where you left off as if it were yesterday.

He's now a public official, and over dinner he began a sentence with: "Now that I'm a politician ..." He said it matter-of-factly and unapologetically.

I was impressed, though not surprised; candor, humor and intellectual honesty have always been among his most appealing qualities. But it reminded me how much I've always despised office-seekers who come here seeking editorial endorsements and begin the conversation with "I'm not a politician."

Then what (as my friend wryly put it) is your name doing on a ballot?

I told him I've long clung to the rueful and probably futile fantasy that a few really good politicians could rehabilitate that word, by re-establishing the premise that public service is an honorable and necessary calling. Speechwriter and author Peggy Noonan, one of American conservatism's most eloquent voices, said something similar in reference to liberals -- that it's up to them to reclaim that familiar and now mostly contemptuous noun/adjective and define themselves, instead of passively letting political foes define them.

Which brings me to the Washington Post, and its generous contribution to the further erosion of trust in what we quaintly used to call "the press" and is now lumped in, to my eternal chagrin, with that monster called The Media.

The story has pretty much come and gone; something as trivial as journalistic sleaze certainly doesn't have the enduring appeal of the still-dead Michael Jackson. But the short postmortem is that Post publisher Katharine Weymouth planned an exclusive "salon" at her home, where for "sponsorships" of up to $250,000, lobbyists could dine and schmooze with Post editors, reporters and members of Congress and the Obama administration.

Newsroom staffers generally expressed outrage, saying that while they understood they were being invited to a dinner, they were unaware of the "off the record" stipulation or that guests were paying for access. Once the story went public, Weymouth canceled the event, saying the solicitations to potential guests "got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."

Glad to hear it.