Counterfactuals are problematic, and probably not the best way to evaluate when something is principle and when it's just an excuse.

There's a way people act when they're doing the right thing at a cost to someone else---at the cost of a wrong thing.

A kind of flinchy-but-standing willingness to take the heat for it, to feel through the suffering themselves.

I think there'd be a lot more "Oh, God, I'm so sorry we're doing this" and a lot less "GO US WE DID IT" if this were a moral thing.

I'm not hearing Barney Frank out there saying,

"This is a fucking dark day, and I may be damned for it, but at least I dragged people a little forward."

And I'm not finding the bit where he excoriated every last coward in Congress who made him leave people behind before finally shaming them into giving him what they did.

So . . . unless I've missed those bits, which is possible, I'm not sure why exactly anyone who knows the history *would* think this was doing right.

Except that there is *nobody* in this world quite so disliked as a victim, and therefore nobody so lionized as the guy who's just let go of the shiv.