For corruption on this scale, we don't need causation. We want people to not only be above board, but we also want the appearances of being above board (so if s

For corruption on this scale, we don't need causation. We want people to not only be above board, but we also want the appearances of being above board (so if something even looks bad, our public figures should avoid it). For this, correlation is a much better standard because it forces office holders to stay away from the smoke too. If we had them say, well sure there's smoke but no fire, we'd have Nixon's missing 18 minutes all over the place.