Go On. Be An Accenture.

Let me start by saying that I hope Tiger Woods repents for what he's done and reforms himself and his relationship with his wife. His brand may be trashed, but there are a lot more important things in his life than that. I'm about to say a lot of harsh things, but that doesn't mean he's irredeemable in the most important ways.

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Why would Accenture drop Tiger Woods for something as mundane as some extramarital club-swinging? After all, he didn't harm any Accenture staff directly, and that kind of behavior is so ordinary that our own politicians keep their jobs after committing the same offenses.

Here's what Accenture knows, which we should pay attention to:

• Tiger did harm Accenture staff, by associating them with a good-looking, smooth-talking person who happens to be a lying philanderer. How many ordinary interactions with Accenture employees were recently colored by the idea that even people who seem perfectly wholesome can be lying bastards? I felt it myself: Right after the Woods story broke, I walked through an airport and saw some of Accenture's signs, and their slogans -- one was something like "Everything depends on what you do next" -- had a completely different context. A public figure's private life is important. Sorry, public figures, but you're going to have to deal with it.


• Lying philanderers are deal-breakers; they make vows and break them. They usually try to cover up what they did. In the real world, nobody trusts lying philandering deal-breakers.


• Most Americans, despite their live-and-let-live mentality, still breathe conservative air. They may say that consenting adults should be able to do what they want, but that's not what they want personally. They don't want their eighteen-year-old daughters to have threesomes with bikers. They want their sons to commit to a woman (yes, a woman, though they may come to accept otherwise) and settle down, not to go through lots of sexual partners. (For that matter, they still prefer to have their children stick to their own race, as this incident highlights.) We won't look up to Tiger now that he's shown his proclivities.

Given the last comment, I'm led to ask, Why do we tolerate the dalliances of politicians? I can only think of one good answer: We think that, as a class, they're contemptible.

Even politicians we like -- those we think of as being "like us" -- aren't brought down completely by scandal. First we respect them; then they show their true colors; then we think of them just like every other politician out there, which is to say, contemptible but mostly tolerable -- a necessary evil. And this isn't a partisan issue. It's true whether you're an immoral Democrat or an immoral Republican.

Tiger wasn't a politician. He was a nice guy, one of us. We're reacting to his scandal the way we would normally react to scandals involving priests, Marines, and soup-kitchen workers. Since he's shown us that he's as bad as a politician, he's utterly incapable of being the face of Accenture.

Where does that leave us?

With the knowledge that we have nothing but contempt for our politicians, and that, if we were smart, we'd do what Accenture does, and throw the bastards out at the first sign of impropriety.

Go on, America. Be an Accenture.

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