George W. Bush could learn a thing or two from Dick Knoebel. (Heck, he could probably learn a thing or two from Sesame Street, but that is beside the point.) The President could learn about honesty and integrity and fidelity to the law. He could learn that a central aspect of leadership is not just espousing and enforcing the rules but living by them, even when they are personally costly or not to one’s liking. He could learn the importance of modeling the principle that no one is above the law. Dick Knoebel clearly knows and believes in this principle, as evidenced by the following report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Police chief practices civil obedience

Most of us will fight to the death to avoid a ticket.

Plead with the cop rude enough to pull us over.

Plead with the judge too dense to understand. Yeah, maybe I’m guilty, but it’s not like everyone else isn’t guilty as well.

Why are you picking on me? Do you have any idea how little money I make?

Dick Knoebel, the police chief of the Village of Kewaskum, makes $59,570 per year. Which seemed like far too little even before we found out he’d paid out $235 of it for a ticket he actually – and this really is true – gave himself.

He didn’t have to. It’s not like he drove past a school bus pulled alongside Fond du Lac Ave. in his village on purpose. He was distracted. He was on duty, though not in a marked squad. He wasn’t even sure the stop sign was out on the bus until he called the company and asked them to check. It was.

“OK,” said the chief, “I will issue myself a citation.”

“It was just the principle of the thing,” the 56-year-old chief said.

“It is so refreshing,” Kewaskum Village President Matt Heiser said. It is.

E-mails of praise for the chief, Heiser said, have shot in from all over the world – and not because Knoebel bragged about it.

According to the chief, a local paper runs the names of individuals who receive citations and a reporter just recently found out about his.

Since then, the story has spread all over the world. The chief confirmed that he received 150 e-mails from places including Germany, Romania, China, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, Canada and England. There was only one negative one, and you can guess where that was from: New York.

People, you can imagine, are flabbergasted by this sort of honesty out in New York. An honest person in New York is a mark, or a fool, or a chump. [full text]

And, sadly, in Washington, DC, an honest person is akin to the ivory-billed woodpecker, i.e., widely considered extinct.