It's tough right now to be liberal. Our political leaders keep tripping themselves with acts of avoidable idiocy. They don't even get caught stealing anything good, just trading political favors for wool suits, making out with interns and shopping with Winona Ryder.

I myself am an honest man. I am so honest, I don't even have furniture. Oh sure, my opponents claim that's not honesty, that I'm just too lazy to go to Goodwill and pick something. But no, I believe it's more ethical to eat everything over the sink, have nowhere to sit except beach chairs and, if I have no reason to leave my house, not bother putting on pants all weekend. I am an honest, honest man.

Yet, New Jersey's fallen Sen. Robert Torricelli stood for many of my beliefs – for example, putting environmental matters as a centerpiece of his campaign. And here is a guy who definitely owns furniture and pants. I also tended to agree politically and economically, by the way, with President Clinton, and it turns out he also owned pants – not that he used them.

Even if Hillary Clinton was right, even if there is a vast, right-wing conspiracy – a bunch of media and oil moguls in an underground bunker with secret files, a pool table, their own Ferris wheel and Satan's fax number on speed-dial – for heaven's sakes, do we have to do all their work for them?

That's what we seem to have done. Torricelli was reprimanded for accepting gifts from a man who has bluntly admitted to seeking favors in return. Now the senator has dropped out of his race for re-election, and his Democratic replacement may not be able to gain momentum. The party could lose the Senate majority as a result, which means Yosemite National Park in California will be replaced with a Planet Hollywood, President Bush will ask for more tax cuts – as a solution for, oh let's say, the AIDS epidemic and the mysterious phenomenon of crop circles – and the Department of Defense will show up in Iraq with 12 nuclear bombs and a couple of announcers from Big Time Wrestling.

Look, most rules of ethics are not difficult. Here are two:

Rule 1: There are only so many gifts most of us could receive from a strange businessman who has a grudge against the North Korean government before we would get, you know, creeped out.

In Torricelli's case, the Senate's ethics committee concluded that his sister, an employee and a friend received diamond earrings from David Chang, who wanted the senator to help him recover money from the North Korean government. It also found that Chang sold Torricelli a television and CD player at significantly below market cost and lent him a couple of bronze statues.

Boy, I can't count the number of times a Korean businessman has offered to lend me his bronze statues.

But I always say no, because the American people have entrusted me with great power – not only with the awesome responsibility of writing this column, but with the even more powerful honor of occasionally unjamming our office's copy machine and somehow being the only person here who knows where to find the Spanish dictionary.

Torricelli, with the considerably humbler task of helping guide the most powerful country on earth, did not gain this same perspective. But then, his perception of reality may have gone askew sometime around when he dated Bianca Jagger.

Rule 2: There has been much confusion as to what does and what does not constitute sex. Does oral sex count? If not, will you marry me? But that's not my point. I'm only saying that defining sex is actually simpler than it's ... made out to be. Get it? Made out. Hello? Is this microphone on? ... Anyway, here's the definition of sex. Post it somewhere: