History is not short of men who reached high office while living lives that merited opprobrium. Dante populated about half of his Inferno with these sorts of figures. The novelty of the last half-century is that their misconduct is becoming more frequently revealed, and sometimes punished, in this life, before the demons of the underworld begin to have at them in the afterlife. Dennis Hastert belongs to that older company which Dante wrote about so vividly 700 years ago, in ways that — as Hastert reminded us — are still rather relevant today.
