It’s a minor news event with a couple of ethics lesson, but as usual, the media’s focus is on the wrong one.

New York’s U.S.  Senators, Gillibrand and Shumer, were talking away on their cell phones before take-off.  The flight attendants announced, as they have been doing on flights since before Cher’s first retirement tour, that it was time to ditch the electronic devices and turn off the cell phones. The senators ignored the instructions, and kept talking anyway, because, you know, their work is So Very Important. Finally an attendant told the two distinguished elected (well, actually, Gillibrand was appointed) officials that they were holding up the flight and to do as they were told.

Sen. Shumer objected, and tried to apply legalistic arguments concerning whether the ceasing of cell phone use was truly required at that point, as opposed to merely being requested. To her credit, the attendant didn’t give ground.

As she walked away Shumer muttered to Gillibrand that the attendant was a “bitch.”

That’s an easy call: Shumer was uncivil and disrespectful, and owes the attendant an apology.

The nasty remark was the lesser of his two transgressions however, and the less significant as well. Shumer attempted to pull rank where he had none: in a commercial airplane, the attendant is in charge, not the U.S. Senator. His initial refusal to respect and follow her directive was pure abuse of power and extreme arrogance. Without saying it, Shumer was attempting the old “Do you know who I am?” tactic, the all-purpose, unethical tool of self-important big-shots everywhere. It means, loosely translated, “I’m so important that the rules don’t apply to me,” and any time a public figure starts thinking like that, the public is on notice. What often comes next is dishonesty, deception and corruption. When a politician thinks he or she has the right to break rules, they usually don’t stop at one, and they frequently don’t stop at rules.

It is a continuing question whether we elect a disproportionate percentage of jerks to represent us in Congress, or whether being elected to Congress tends to turn people into jerks. Whichever is true, the following can be safely employed as a guideline: when a public official starts believing he  deserves different treatment than the people he represents, it may be time to send him home.