Why it works is pretty simple too. Members of Congress are mostly rich, but they spend a lot of time with people who are really rich, so they need a constant influx of free shit like concert tickets and vacations in order to “keep up” with the people they actually respect and care about. The staffers of members of Congress, though, are almost entirely not rich, at all, and they, too, spend a lot of their time around people with money (most of them went to school with people who went on to make a lot of money), so bribing them with job offers is potentially even more effective. Representatives and senators rely on their staffs to tell them how to vote, and their overworked and underpaid staffs frequently rely on lobbyists.

“60 Minutes” tries its hardest to be tough on Abramoff, but it’s impossible for a news outlet to give the guy this much airtime without basically enabling his rehabilitation effort. It certainly won’t hurt his book sales.

The new Abramoff scam

As the great Dan Froomkin pretty clearly reveals in one of his posts on the book, Abramoff is still deceiving, trying to implicate Democrats in what was an almost exclusively Republican scandal, and absolving his allies and co-conspirators of responsibility while accusing those who exposed Abramoff’s crimes of corruption. In his book, convicted criminal former Rep. Bob Ney is a naif led astray, while Byron Dorgan and Harry Reid knowingly took his dirty money.

Part of the new Abramoff scam is coming off as an earnest reformer, too. The whole system is corrupt, Abramoff says to “60 Minutes.” In his book, he rails against the corruption of the people whom … he worked very hard to corrupt:

“Most of these legislators had taken thousands of dollars from my clients and firms, and now they were sitting as impartial judges against me. Washington hypocrisy at its best,” he writes. “Members swim in a swamp of corruption, and thrive in it, but they are able — with a straight face no less — to accuse others at will and sanctimoniously punish what they see as malfeasance.”

“Everyone in Washington is a sanctimonious hypocrite” is a line that a lot of people will agree with. It has a bit more moral authority coming from literally anyone who isn’t Jack Abramoff.

But jail time, according to Abramoff, changed him. Now he even has a lobbying reform proposal! It has one real idea (permantly end the “revolving door” between congressional offices and lobbying firms) and a bunch of nonsense and unrelated stuff (term limits, repeal the 17th Amendment). It’s not a particularly serious attempt to deal with the issue of how money corrupts politics. (For that, try Lawrence Lessig?)

Washington forgives almost everyone, of course, no matter their crimes. Tucker Carlson is hosting Jack Abramoff’s book party, and I’m sure Carlson thinks that’s a delightfully wicked thing to do. (The book is published by the lunatic birthers of WorldNetDaily, the world’s silliest and least respectable source of wholly made-up news, which is why I am not naming or linking to it. Google if you’re curious.)

There’s no reason we should take Abramoff the contrite reformer seriously. He was a pious moralizer when he was buying off legislators with golf trips and he’s a pious moralizer now that he’s been humbled by some time in jail and a lower standard of living. Let’s not enable his comeback tour, lest he end up like Chuck Colson or something, permanently comfortably employed by the conservative pundit welfare system.

Granted, the perception of the CBS pundit as a gasbag who overstayed his welcome isn’t unearned. The sun didn’t rise or set based on whatever he said at five minutes to eight Eastern time each Sunday night, and during the final stretch of Rooney’s tenure — which started in 1978 and will end this Sunday with his sign-off — he didn’t exactly challenge himself to explore new frontiers. He stuck with what worked for him: griping about inflation or recession or political hypocrisy, admitting that he was out-of-touch and not losing any sleep over it, pointing out life’s annoyances and pleasures, opening his letters and packages on the air.

Along the way, Rooney ticked people off, and not always with his “60 Minutes” commentaries. His 2007 newspaper column about Latino players’ dominance of baseball (“I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me”) got him in trouble, as did his 1990 TV special ”A Year with Andy Rooney,” which included off-the-cuff remarks describing “homosexual unions” on a list of “self-induced ills” that “kill us.” Rooney compounded that last scandal by giving an interview to The Advocate in which he allegedly said, “Most people are born with equal intelligence, but blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. They drop out of school early, do drugs and get pregnant.” I say “allegedly” because Rooney strongly denied saying those last couple of lines, and there was no tape of the interview. Was he lying? Maybe. But to my knowledge, he copped to — and apologized for — every other thoughtlessly offensive public comment he made, voluntarily or under CBS duress. “That’s what I do for a living,” he told the New York Times in a story about the baseball flap. “I write columns and have opinions, and some of them are pretty stupid.”

Well, sure. But many of them were amusing, in a beetle-browed grandpa sort of way. A few of them were poignant or provocative. And nearly all of them were well-written and sincere — punchy, economical, honest to a fault.

Rooney’s job on “60 Minutes” was to be himself and say whatever popped into his head. He was very good at it. The level of craft that he brought to bear on the low-stakes feature “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” is easy to take for granted. I don’t have much patience with anyone who dismisses Andy Rooney as nothing more than a bigoted old crank who had a cushy job on “60 Minutes.” People who would say such a thing don’t know much about Rooney, don’t appreciate the complexities and contradictions of the human personality, and don’t appreciate good writing.

Here’s a bit from an Andy Rooney column collected in his book “Out of My Mind.”

On television, the reporters pad their parts by saying things like, ‘There will be an accumulation of eight inches of snow on the roads tomorrow morning during rush hour, so allow yourself extra time and drive carefully.” Has any driver in history driven more carefully because of being admonished to do so by a radio or television announcer?’

The traffic reporters and weather experts both give a lot of advice. The traffic reporter will say, “There’s a four-car pileup with an overturned tractor-trailer on I-90, so stay to your right.”

The other advice they give, as though they were being helpful, is to travelers: “Kennedy Airport is closed to all traffic, so call your airline in advance for flight information.” Have they ever tried to call an airline? Airlines don’t have people answering telephones. You have as much chance of getting information about a flight from an airline as you as you have of finding out whether we’re at war with Iran by calling the White House and asking to talk to President Bush.

That’s the Rooney style. It’s simple, direct and funny without trying too hard. You can hear him saying those words, or something very close to them, in a “60 Minutes” piece. His broadcast voice and his print voice are the same, and his extemporaneous speaking voice is very close to it. It’s an excellent voice for a professional curmudgeon whose job is to riff on modern life in two-minute televised bursts.

But it can also be applied to more serious, personal writing — as Rooney, a reporter for Stars and Stripes during World War II, demonstrated in 1995′s “My War,” one of the greatest firsthand accounts of the Allied experience in Europe. Rooney won a Bronze star for his reporting, which included accounts of the liberation of Buchenwald, the French Seconde Division Blindée’s ride into Paris, and the D-Day landing. Recalling the sight of thousands of dead soldiers sprawled on the beach at Normandy, he wrote: “I remember the boots. All the same on such different boys.”

From the book’s first chapter, “Drafted”:

War brings up questions to which there are no answers. One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in a country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime, Maybe that’s enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If I could only get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.

Rooney’s career was more varied and accomplished than some might realize. He started in television when television was just getting started. He wrote for “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” and CBS News’ public affairs program “The 20th Century.” He and his future “60 Minutes” colleague Harry Reasoner pioneered a new form of TV news writing that flowered briefly in the ’60s and ’70s, the long essay — a more complex and ambitious precursor to the bits he would do on “60 Minutes.” For his 1975 special “Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington,” he won television’s highest honor, the Peabody. Rooney wrote the script for the 1975 TV documentary “FDR: The Man Who Changed America,” and won an Emmy for writing the 1968 special “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed,” part of a series of CBS specials titled “Of Black America.” When I met Kurt Vonnegut at college literary event in 1990 and asked him who he thought an aspiring writer should study, Andy Rooney was on his short list.

It was perhaps inevitable that Rooney would become associated with the ticking stopwatch of “60 Minutes.” The CBS News magazine, which debuted in 1968, was — and remains — the best-written news broadcast on TV. The correpondents’ copy was taut and lyrical and almost never overwrought. Their introductions and narration were composed in that clean, purposeful voice that dominated post-World War I journalism and fiction. The voice was embodied by the likes of Dashell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Ernest Hemingway and E.B. White, but it was probably birthed by the invention of the typewriter. It was Rooney’s voice, too, and he wielded it with much authority and little fuss.

More than anything else, Rooney is a writer, and a good one. He didn’t become a pop culture icon because of his good looks or charming personality. He did it by expressing himself clearly and concisely, in language that connected with readers and viewers. He writes in the spare, mostly adjective-free style that was fashionable in the post-Hemingway era, and that you had to master if you wanted a job in newspapers. It’s a style that’s rarely seen today except in crime novels and certain big-city tabloids.

When I profiled Rooney for the Newark Star-Ledger in 1998, he brought me into his office and showed me his typewriter, a black Underwood that was older than the CBS News building that we were meeting in. It sat on a gnarled, vaguely Tolkien-esque desk that Rooney built himself. He said he’d been dragged into the computer age in 1989 because his bosses were tired of having to have interns key his typewritten scripts into CBS’ computer system, but that he still wrote personal letters and responded to reader mail on his Underwood.

“There’s really no good reason to keep using it,” he told me. “But I like the typewriter. I like the sound of it. When I write on a computer screen, I feel like the words really don’t exist. But when I write on a typewriter, they’re real.”

Rooney isn’t perfect. He isn’t always likable. Sometimes you wish he’d put a sock in it. His eyebrows are terrifying. But he’s real, uncomfortably real — maybe one of the realest Americans on prime-time TV, and the only one who continued to have a national platform into his 90s. Every family has at least one Andy Rooney in it — a person who’s lived a long and not always pleasurable life, and who has decided that from now on he’s going to say whatever he wants — and if you don’t like it, tough.

Reasonable people may disagree on whether Andy Rooney was funny, or whether he should have stayed on “60 Minutes” for as long as he did. But the man is a fine writer of a sort that is gradually disappearing along with his generation. His personality provokes debate. His talent demands respect.

“Andy always said he wanted to work until the day he died, and he managed to do it, save the last few weeks in the hospital,” said his “60 Minutes” colleague, correspondent Steve Kroft.

Rooney talked on “60 Minutes” about what was in the news, and his opinions occasionally got him in trouble. But he was just as likely to discuss the old clothes in his closet, why air travel had become unpleasant and why banks needed to have important-sounding names.

Rooney won one of his four Emmy Awards for a piece on whether there was a real Mrs. Smith who made Mrs. Smith’s Pies. As it turned out, there was no Mrs. Smith.

“I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn’t realize they thought,” Rooney once said. “And they say, ‘Hey, yeah!’ And they like that.”

Looking for something new to punctuate its weekly broadcast, “60 Minutes” aired its first Rooney commentary on July 2, 1978. He complained about people who keep track of how many people die in car accidents on holiday weekends. In fact, he said, the Fourth of July is “one of the safest weekends of the year to be going someplace.”

More than three decades later, he was railing about how unpleasant air travel had become. “Let’s make a statement to the airlines just to get their attention,” he said. “We’ll pick a week next year and we’ll all agree not to go anywhere for seven days.”

In early 2009, as he was about to turn 90, Rooney looked ahead to President Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration with a look at past inaugurations. He told viewers that Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 swearing-in was the first to be broadcast on radio, adding, “That may have been the most interesting thing Coolidge ever did.”

“Words cannot adequately express Andy’s contribution to the world of journalism and the impact he made — as a colleague and a friend — upon everybody at CBS,” said Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp. president and CEO.

Jeff Fager, CBS News chairman and “60 Minutes” executive producer, said “it’s hard to imagine not having Andy around. He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. We will miss him very much.”

For his final essay, Rooney said that he’d live a life luckier than most.

“I wish I could do this forever. I can’t, though,” he said.

He said he probably hadn’t said anything on “60 Minutes” that most of his viewers didn’t already know or hadn’t thought. “That’s what a writer does,” he said. “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.”

True to his occasional crotchety nature, though, he complained about being famous or bothered by fans. His last wish from fans: If you see him in a restaurant, just let him eat his dinner.

Rooney was a freelance writer in 1949 when he encountered CBS radio star Arthur Godfrey in an elevator and — with the bluntness millions of people learned about later — told him his show could use better writing. Godfrey hired him and by 1953, when he moved to TV, Rooney was his only writer.

He wrote for CBS’ Garry Moore during the early 1960s before settling into a partnership with Harry Reasoner at CBS News. Given a challenge to write on any topic, he wrote “An Essay on Doors” in 1964, and continued with contemplations on bridges, chairs and women.

“The best work I ever did,” Rooney said. “But nobody knows I can do it or ever did it. Nobody knows that I’m a writer and producer. They think I’m this guy on television.”

He became such a part of the culture that comic Joe Piscopo satirized Rooney’s squeaky voice with the refrain, “Did you ever wonder …” Rooney never started any of his essays that way. For many years, “60 Minutes” improbably was the most popular program on television and a dose of Rooney was what people came to expect for a knowing smile on the night before they had to go back to work.

Rooney left CBS in 1970 when it refused to air his angry essay about the Vietnam War. He went on TV for the first time, reading the essay on PBS and winning a Writers Guild of America award for it.

He returned to CBS three years later as a writer and producer of specials. Notable among them was the 1975 “Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington,” whose lighthearted but serious look at government won him a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting.

His words sometimes landed Rooney in hot water. CBS suspended him for three months in 1990 for making racist remarks in an interview, which he denied. Rooney, who was arrested in Florida while in the Army in the 1940s for refusing to leave a seat among blacks on a bus, was hurt deeply by the charge of racism.

Gay rights groups were mad, during the AIDS epidemic, when Rooney mentioned homosexual unions in saying “many of the ills which kill us are self-induced.” Indians protested when Rooney suggested Native Americans who made money from casinos weren’t doing enough to help their own people.

The Associated Press learned the danger of getting on Rooney’s cranky side. In 1996, AP Television Writer Frazier Moore wrote a column suggesting it was time for Rooney to retire. On Rooney’s next “60 Minutes” appearance, he invited those who disagreed to make their opinions known. The AP switchboard was flooded by some 7,000 phone calls and countless postcards were sent to the AP mail room.

“Your piece made me mad,” Rooney told Moore two years later. “One of my major shortcomings — I’m vindictive. I don’t know why that is. Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It’s a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened.”He was one of television’s few voices to strongly oppose the war in Iraq after the George W. Bush administration launched it in 2002. After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, he said he was chastened by its quick fall but didn’t regret his “60 Minutes” commentaries.

“I’m in a position of feeling secure enough so that I can say what I think is right and if so many people think it’s wrong that I get fired, well, I’ve got enough to eat,” Rooney said at the time.

Andrew Aitken Rooney was born on Jan. 14, 1919, in Albany, N.Y., and worked as a copy boy on the Albany Knickerbocker News while in high school. College at Colgate University was cut short by World War II, when Rooney worked for Stars and Stripes.

With another former Stars and Stripes staffer, Oram C. Hutton, Rooney wrote four books about the war. They included the 1947 book, “Their Conqueror’s Peace: A Report to the American Stockholders,” documenting offenses against the Germans by occupying forces.

Rooney and his wife, Marguerite, were married for 62 years before she died of heart failure in 2004. They had four children and lived in New York, with homes in Rowayton, Conn., and upstate New York. Daughter Emily Rooney is a former executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” Brian was a longtime ABC News correspondent, Ellen a photographer and Martha Fishel is chief of the public service division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Both in the book “Truth and Consequences,” which hits stores today, and on “60 Minutes,” Ruth Madoff insists that she was “absolutely not involved” in the Ponzi scheme that wiped out billions and became the largest financial fraud in history. And she explained to an incredulous Morley Safer why she stood by a husband who’s serving 150 years in prison and discussed the sleeping-pill suicide attempt she claims the couple made on Christmas Eve 2008, as their empire was collapsing. “We had terrible phone calls,” she says. “Hate mail, just beyond anything and I said, ‘I just can’t go on anymore.’”

But if she thought that revealing this story three years later would evoke sympathy, Ruth Madoff had another thing coming. Comments on the Wall Street Journal’s website currently lean toward the “liar” and “scumbag” themes. Gawker, with its typical resistance to sensitivity, has already whooped that “The Madoffs Failed to Commit Suicide, Unfortunately.” ABC News, meanwhile, questioned why the Madoffs were speaking up now, and got psychologist Judy Kuriansky to speculate, “I think it’s a play for sympathy and book sales.” Kuriansky then added, brutally: “People who are smart enough to con millions of colleagues out of so much money … are smart enough to know how many sleeping pills to take to ensure not waking up.” Think you’re so damn smart, Madoffs? Then why aren’t you dead?

Few among us would disagree with the assessment that Bernie Madoff is a scumbag. The only injustice in his 150-year prison sentence is that he won’t live to serve every last miserable day of it. And the fact that Madoff’s surviving son Andrew says that “I’m not hearing sincerity and remorse” in the letters he’s received from his father suggests not only that old Bernie is exactly where he’s supposed to be, but that if there is a hell, he will soon get his own special ring of it.

Still, it’s easy to forget the humanity of our greatest villains – to see them solely as blood-crazed despots or sneering, mustache-twirling scoundrels. It’s easy to imagine them as monsters — and to transfer that cartoonish infamy to their immediate family members. But frankly, what his family appears guiltiest of is simply having the last name Madoff.

If you or I had that notorious last name, maybe we’d just slink off into the sunset. Or, after a few horrifying years, we’d start talking about it – even if it meant accepting more criticism and wishes for our death. Ruth Madoff, who says she “never thought of leaving” her spouse, is also the mother who has lived through what she calls “the most awful thing that can happen to anybody — the suicide of a child.” Challenging as this may be for the many of us so wronged by the untrammeled excess and greed of a financial system run amok, when we cavalierly make sport of depression, despair and death – even when those things befall families whose patriarchs suck – it doesn’t make us the good guys. Acknowledging the complexities within a person’s life is not the same as condoning anybody’s actions. And just because people are part of the 1 percent, they can still be the victims of bullying, grief and tragedy – exactly like everybody else.