The act of fighting political corruption is a little like the bird flu. There's a frenzy of hysteria every 10 years or so, and then there's a vaccine or something and it all goes away. The Watergate-Abscam ("American Hustle") era of the mid-to-late 1970s, New York City's mob and corruption scandals of the mid-1980s, the Clinton fundraising scandals of the mid-1990s, the bug at Philadelphia City Hall in the mid-2000s. Now in 2014, indictments are the new black -- the ex-governor of Virginia, a conservative pundit who made a movie attacking Obama and got nailed by Obama's Justice Department (I'm sure no one will find that suspicious), and now New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez is being investigated for the umpteenth time.