We live in a country where the President has proposed a budget with a $400 billion deficit.

A country with a corrupt campaign-financing system, rotting cities, rampant violence, third-rate schools, a dying industrial base, lagging productivity, crumbling health care, grotesquely overpaid business executives and lawyers, bankrupt savings-and-loans, soul-crushing poverty, disappearing forests, profligate overconsumption of oil, richly padded employees’ expense accounts, and undisciplined voters who yelp whenever they are taxed to pay for the benefits they so insistently demand. A country that stares at the sky through a thinning ozone layer.

So what is everybody scandalized by these days? What is it that has whipped the radio talk shows into a frenzy, the public into an apopolexy, and the press into a feeding frenzy?

And what is Attorney General William Barr having investigated by a special counsel-who is the former GOP judge Barr clerked for, no less?

Why, the great congressional "check-kiting scandal," of course.

This is a scandal in which not one dime of public money was stolen or misappropriated. Nor were more than a handful of "rubber" checks on the House Bank "bounced" or "kited."

The rampant misuse of these words by virtually every mass publication in the country involves more than just loose semantics and flaccid oversimplications reverberating through the echo chamber of pack journalism.

It reflects a reckless lust to pander to public ignorance by hyping humdrum transactions that would sound far less scandalous if they were described as the interest-free overdraft privileges that they in fact were.

A couple of definitions, from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: "Bounce. . . of a check: to be returned by a bank as no good (as because of lack of funds).”

”Kite … to get money or credit by a kite; specif, to create a false bank balance by manipulating deposit accounts.

Bounced, kited, and bad or rubber checks almost always have victims: those paid with pieces of paper that purport to be exchangeable for cash, but are in fact (or may prove to be) worthless.

Nobody (least of all payees) was deceived by the House Bank’s overdraft policies. The whole fuss is about the fact that the bank (really a cooperative disbursing and check-cashing institution) honored overdrafts when payees presented them for payment, and, unlike commercial banks, did so without charging the check-writers interest.

There were no victims of the House Bank’s overdrafts either, unless we count the modest imposition (cost: zero) on those House members whose non-interest-bearing balances were used to finance interest-free loans to colleagues.

In short, this is a scandal in which the vast majority of the 355 current and former House members (including three Bush Cabinet officers) who have been branded in the media as "check-bouncers," or "check-kiters," or passers of "rubber checks," did absolutely nothing wrong.

Unless, that is, it’s wrong to avail oneself of a modest employment perk: The bank had a decades-old policy of honoring overdrafts up to the amount of each member’s next monthly paycheck, secured by the bank’s right to hold that paycheck.

This provided each member with what was in essence an interest-free line of credit of up to his or her monthly net salary, currently about $7,000; that would bring in maybe $300 a year in interest.

It’s not that House members "couldn’t balance their own checkbooks," as cliche-crafters say; they didn’t need to balance their checkbooks.

A shocking example of lordly legislative privilege?

Oh, get off it. Let him cast the first stone who has never stayed in a fancy hotel at company expense when a cheap one was available, or taken a vacation trip using frequent-flier miles accumulated on business trips, or made personal calls from work, or had a secretary type a personal letter, or copied personal papers at the office.

In fact, unlike such private-sector perks, the overdraft privileges House members enjoyed were financed by the members themselves. The aggregate non-interest-bearing balances that most members left on deposit were always large enough to offset (and typically about 10 times as large as) the overdrafts written by other members.

The House Bank’s taxpayer-financed administrative costs were substantial, of course. But who do you think pays for the administrative costs of the White House mess-not to mention White House dinners?

The worst that can fairly be said of the now defunct House Bank was that perhaps 5 percent to 15 percent of the members (depending on who’s counting) systematically abused the opportunity to secure large, interest-free loans, courtesy of-not the taxpayers-but fellow member-depositors; that the bank’s management was indulgent with these abusers and sloppy in its operations and record-keeping; and that the House leadership compounded these problems with its bumbling resistance to demands for full disclosure.

All this reflects badly on the leadership’s managerial skills and sensitivity to appearances.

And, sure, as the symbol mongers and metaphor mavens have been tiresomely blathering, the House Bank’s indulgence of legislators calls to mind other ways in which they have created cocoons of convenience to insulate themselves from the quotidian bumps and travails mat are the lot of ordinary citizens.

Big deal. This differentiates members of Congress not one whit from the nation’s other pampered movers and shakers: Air Force One-flying presidents, Lear Jet-hopping CEOs, first-class-flying bankers and lawyers, limousine-riding government officials. Mercedes-driving columnists.

So the case of the House Bank may be good fun as a minor chapter in the old, old story of free lunches for fat cats.

But for it to be taken up by the press and public as a scandal of the first magnitude shows lamentable shallowness on the part of both.

And for it to be ballyhooed with such orgasmic glee by Wall Street Journal editorialists and other right-wing Congress-bashers is a transparent pretext for harping on their constant theme: that the elected representatives of the people are such a mess that the executive branch should be trusted to run things without interference from them.

And for it to be made the focus of a criminal inquiry smacks of blatant abuse of prosecutorial power for political ends. (It was gratifying to see this apparent pandering to the White House backfire when the class of "suspects" turned out to include Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and two other Cabinet members.)

Get serious, people. Why is a nation that sleepwalks through the tripling of the national debt and condones a campaign-finance system of legalized extortion so upset about trivia?

Why are the front pages littered with screaming headlines about "check-kiting" when one must turn to Page A14 to find out about the Bush administration’s apparent cover-up of its pre-war coddling of Saddam Hussein and his war machine?

This misallocation of outrage is not the fault of Republican rabble-rousers and the media elite alone. It is the fault of those tens of millions of typical voters who shop in the marketplace of ideas by lapping up the fatuous fare of Geraldo, Oprah, and The McLaughlin Group and the paranoid fantasies of Oliver Stone’s ”JFK.”

Serious journalists perceived at the outset that this was a tempest in a teapot. Then the radio talk-show hosts and their ilk showed once again how easy it is to twitch the crazy bone of the electorate. Then the quality press, worried about being out of touch with the real people, dove headlong into the journalistic race to the bottom.

The difficulty of getting voters exercised about public affairs by means other than feeding them distorted analogies to their own experiences-as in, "Dammit, when I bounce a check I get charged a penalty!”-is a large part of the reason why this country can’t seem to get its act together.

We have met the enemy, and he is us. If Joseph de Maistre was right about every nation getting the government it deserves, the House Bank "scandal" suggests that this nation’s government is likely to get worse before it gets better.