James Traficant is all too symbolic of the modern trend toward criminal fraud and deceit.

James Traficant is the current poster child for the growing notion that one can spin a yarn and not be held accountable to reality.

He is the frumpy former Ohio congressman who has been sentenced to eight years in prison on corruption charges.

At least the judge in the sentencing case has some notion of what is sensible.

U.S. District Judge Lesley Wells gave Traficant a longer sentence than the minimum 7 1/2 years that prosecutors had sought. Wells declared that Traficant had no respect for the government he said he wanted to serve again and that he used lies and deceit to distract attention from the charges against him. The judge also refused to let Traficant out on bail while he appeals his conviction.

Yet the 61-year-old Ohioan, the first member of Congress since the Civil War to be kicked out of office, keeps bleating about how he has been set up and railroaded. His actions in Congress have been tasteless and dishonest; he is fortunate he was not assessed jail-time for that. He was fairly judged and rightly penalized on charges of bribery, tax evasion and racketeering.

Then in another show of defiance, Traficant said he planned to seek a 10th term in the U.S. House, campaigning from whatever cell and institution to which he may be confined. If people from his district are dumb enough to vote for him, they deserve what they get.

Traficant’s attempted manipulations of fiction as fact are so typical of the many people these days who cannot understand the word “no,” refuse to accept closure after a fair hearing and use every means, fair and foul, to escape responsibility for their own actions.

How disgusting is this “it’s somebody else’s fault” approach to life? We see high-profile adults using that line and setting the example for young people to do the same.

In the case of Traficant and so many others, it must be “you do the crime, you do the time,” no matter how much subterfuge is introduced to squirm out of the hard-bottomed cauldron of reality.