My grandfather used to advise my father when he was a boy, "Never get in a peeing contest with a skunk, because you'll smell like him."

And my decent, well-meaning father passed along that wisdom to me -- along with the following, seemingly contradictory bit of wisdom: "Always stand up to a bully." Juxtaposing these "rules" caused me to spend a lot of time in my childhood trying to distinguish between skunks and bullies, but even now I can't spell out exactly what it is. It comes down to an "I know it when I see it," "wisdom to know the difference" distinction involving considerations of personal honor. If you fail to stand up to a bully, you dishonor yourself. But getting into a peeing contest with a skunk of a person can also bring dishonor. These concepts of virtue are not easy to master, especially for children.

The primary issue is usually along the lines of "who started it." As a practical matter, if the skunk "pees" on you first, well, you already smell like him no matter what you do. So peeing "back" in a retaliatory manner isn't going to make you smell any worse.

To that extent, the "peeing skunk" analogy fails.

But obviously, we're not talking about peeing contests with skunks. First of all, no one in his right mind would pee on a skunk -- whether in a retaliatory or unprovoked manner; normal people would get the hell away from the skunk ASAP. And scientifically speaking, when skunks spray they do not pee, but rather, they direct a stream of long-lasting, highly offensive fluid from their anal musk glands. So it's an Aesop type parable -- a common-sense warning to "clean" people to avoid getting down and dirty with someone who is already down and dirty. (Interestingly, in nature skunks do not spray each other.)

In a political mud-slinging contest, it's logical that the down and dirty person has a double advantage over a cleaner opponent. That's because throwing dirt at a thoroughly dirty person can't be expected to make much difference. A thoroughly dirty person simply remains thoroughly dirty, and no moral stigma attaches to additional "dirt."

In this respect, political mud (or even skunk stench) can be analogized to saturation diving:

"Saturation" refers to the fact that the diver's tissues have absorbed the maximum partial pressure of gas possible for that depth due to the diver being exposed to breathing gas at that pressure for prolonged periods. This is significant because once the tissues become saturated, the time to ascend from depth, to decompress safely, will not increase with further exposure.

Commonly, saturation diving allows professional divers to live and work at depths greater than 50 metres / 165 feet for days or weeks at a time.

Of course, throwing the Ken Starr insult at Obama is the penultimate invitation to mud-slinging. It's almost a double dare.

By people who revel in their own mud.

Barack Obama is faced with a choice now of whether or not to sling back. He desperately wants to remain Mr. Clean, a nice guy, and decent man. Clearly, he's been damaged by the Rezko revelations, so he's no longer Mr. Clean in that respect. But should he get down and dirty with the Clintons ("stoop to their level" is the phrase most bandied about) and resort to their kind of mud-slinging?

Will he forever lose his once-refreshing ethos of decency if he does?

Is it a question of honor?

It's a judgment call, and I don't honestly know. If he toughs it out and loses by not fighting back on the Clintons' level, does he save what's left of his honor?

Or is this one of those situations where he loses his honor by not returning fire and meeting the Clintons tit for tat (or, dirt clod for dirt clod)?

I started this post yesterday and I was all ready to forget about my childhood lessons in virtue and write about more tempting topics, but then I saw that Ann Althouse has weighed in thoughtfully, and her post reminded me of the skunk-versus-bully quandary. Or is it a dilemma? I don't know, but Althouse seems to think that Obama is allowing himself to be bullied:

...I don't need to learn that Clinton will do whatever it takes to win, and perhaps that does earn the label "monster," but let's not ignore the deficiencies in Barack Obama. How does he intend to win by shrinking away when her people pull their tricks? Where is his vigor? And, more importantly, where is his courage? It was cowardly to allow the Clinton campaign to savage Power and rip her away from him.

And now I'm wondering whether there is anything courageous about Barack Obama. Obama supporters, please: Make the case to me that the man has courage. And don't say that he opposed the war in Iraq, because I don't think, in the position he was in at the time, that it took courage to oppose the war. That served his political ambitions. Tell me something he did that was difficult to do, that took some risk to do what was right.

There are ways to show courage without slinging mud. One way would be to simply refuse to sling mud, and take whatever comes. Hold a press conference with Ken Starr and (without endorsing special prosecutor tactics) denounce mudslinging and the politics of personal destruction? That might sound silly, but the Clintons will characterize any defense by Obama as mud-slinging, so it might be an opportunity for Obama to just repeat more dramatically what he has been saying all along: that it's time to move past mud-slinging politics. Canning Samantha Power might look cowardly, but it is at least consistent with Obama's anti-mud-slinging ethos. (Perhaps he could invite the Clintons to do the same, and can Howard Wolfson....)

The most troubling aspect of all of this is that the Clintonian style of mud-slinging seems to work. According to the very latest polls, Hillary now does better against McCain than does Obama.

The mud-slinging against McCain is getting geared up; last night CNN had one of the most condescending hit pieces against McCain's wife that I've seen, and yesterday he was accused of a tantrum that wasn't. But it's barely beginning; they'll try to spin him as an angry old womanizing warmonger suffering from dementia.

I think McCain may have teflon, though -- which is a very different thing than being saturated. Whether it will stand up to a sustained campaign of mud-slinging by the totally saturated Clintons, who knows?

UPDATE (03/10/08): Comparing the Clintons to zombies who never seem to die, Andrew Sullivan admits that they make him sick -- literally:

There have been moments this past week when I have felt physically ill at the thought of that pair returning to power.