The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has written a brilliant column satirizing the culture of buckraking in Washington.

In the column, Cohen pretends to defend public servants who sacrifice multi-million dollar earnings in order to return to the White House for low six-figure salaries.

There are few among us who would take a multimillion-dollar pay cut. Yes, you could say, someone like [Lawrence] Summers could make it back, but that’s not really — or always — the case. Take Tom Daschle. Here was a man who was not trying to build a career. He is 61, and his career is largely behind him. Yet he was willing to give up a lucrative lobbying practice to go back into government as secretary of health and human services. It turns out he cared more about reforming health care than he did about building a fortune.

Imagine that! Caring more about reforming health care than about building a fortune. Truly, Tom Daschle deserves our society’s highest praise.

Cohen’s execution is masterful. He never undercuts his deadpan tone, never concedes that he knows full well the idiocy of his argument. All the way through to his conclusion below, Cohen never lets us in on the joke.

In our scandal-soaked culture, it is de rigueur to denigrate public officials and to search for the inevitable conflict of interest. But here are people, such as Summers, who have put aside wealth and lavish perks for government service. They have their reasons, sure, but whatever they are, we — not they — are the richer for it.

Wonderful! Writing in such a deadpan manner takes guts, because of course, if we thought Cohen actually believed those words, then we would think him a jackass. Of course he doesn’t actually think that Larry Summers didn’t revel in the perks of power—it’s not because Summers loved that chauffeur that he got one at Harvard!—or that Goldman Sachs paid Summers $135,000 a speech just to soak in his eloquence. Because if he did, then Cohen would be a buffoon, and how could you get an opinion column in a mainstream newspaper by being a buffoon?

How encouraging to see that satire is not dead.