Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Down to Size Michael Fumento displays a profound misunderstanding when he says, in "Fetal Attraction" (TAS, July 1992), that we pro-lifers "believe that the more developed the...
...This is as good a paradigm as any of the otherwise intelligent bleeding heart, who lets ideology overrule both head and heart...
...I once tried my game on a fairly high-level GAO executive...
...Compared to professional victims and droning welfare bureaucrats who would rather rationalize violence and hatred than act to curb lawlessness, political bosses of the late nineteenth-century were principled, pragmatic, and extravagantly responsive to their constituents...
...James Redding West Pawlet, Vermont Sherman's Early March W.T...
...Until your correspondent returns to the East Coast, I suggest that you change "Capitol Ideas" to a heading that would better reflect the content of Tom Bethell's submissions...
...The consequent judgments on "performance" are worthless even when they do not happen to be partisan...
...Barney Frank...
...William Vesterman Piscataway, New JerseyFormer KGB...
...Where the shucking off of the Communist yoke...
...This status quo must not stand...
...No one bothered with corrective measures...
...Exactly backwards...
...So much for Jimmy Carter and his "Junkyard Dogs...
...It seems to me that the media's lack of curiosity, as recounted by Eastland, was no less egregious on the subject of Professor Hill's polygraph test...
...By 1980 this attitude was gone...
...Any final reservations about their innocence...
...Please...
...Many of their sources for information on Pre-Castro Cuba are Cubans of an academic or media background...
...I visited Cuba in July 1991 and can corroborate many of the conditions he describes...
...Minor gave the amazing reply, "I've heard of such cases, but I don't know that I've ever had one...
...But in his careful effort to explicate "former KGB" spy programs in the West, Haselkorn fails to achieve the desired "unified field theory" that could clarify the cohesion of all these actions with one elegant equation: CIS = USSR...
...Minor conceded he had made errors and apologized...
...Any Cuban wealthy enough or well-connected enough could go any place an American could...
...Believe me, I certainly did...
...A single plan of espionage like those Haselkorn outlines may of course take decades to implement, as moles and spies are moved from agency level to level in positions of the foreign government under surveillance...
...Stanford and Sodom-by-the-Bay-Watch" would probably be the most honestly descriptive title, but if you put your minds to it I'm sure you could come up with something more short and sweet...
...In other words, the transition of the KGB to the "former KGB" (the Russian FIS) . . . necessarily implies the continuation of the same plots, plans, or efforts that were underway ten years ago...
...The reports soon skirted the facts so widely that if any real crunch came, they could easily be refuted...
...Some resorts in pre-Castro Cuba had a color bar...
...McFadden also hits upon a large part of the cause of the problem: GAO only hires at the entrance level, new college grads with degrees in accounting who have no experience at all...
...Roch Steinbach Portland, Oregon While Quebec Burns I don't imagine that there is anyone among your subscribers who holds Tom Bethell's columns in higher esteem than I. But one small detail has grown rather irritating: the column's title remains "Capitol Ideas...
...When a report came in to an agency, staffers jumped through hoops to comply with the recommendations and write a reply showing problem areas had been corrected...
...We befriended a black nightclub emcee...
...Sherman did serve in the Mexican War as Paul Johnson says in his review of Jefferson Davis (TAS, July 1992), but not in Mexico with other future commanders, as Johnson implies...
...Richard Bostan Coquitlam, British Columbia 70 The American Spectator September 1992...
...Sherman was in California, broadening his horizons as administrator, surveyor, and engineer...
...I was a 25-year employee of the Executive Branch and during most of my time, my duties included the preparation of answers to GAO reports...
...As I wandered through Mirador, an upscale residential suburb of Havana, I did not see any blacks residing there...
...James P Pinkerton Washington, D. C. Cuban Jim Crow The mythology of Castroism is pervasive enough in the mainstream media and academia...
...But the necessary implication escapes him...
...The museum Symmes mentions features a history of the revolution...
...But none barred by nationality...
...They have no idea how an agency works and they are never put anywhere they can learn...
...I never thought I would say it, but: GAO, where are you when we need you...
...The man denied the allegations...
...He refused to play...
...While a number of newspapers described the limitations of polygraph tests in general, only the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times took note of the none-too-distinguished track record of the particular polygraph examiner hired by Professor Hill's team...
...Cuba is one of the most racist societies in the world today...
...This state of affairs ought to scare thepublic to death...
...J. Park Austin, Texas Price is Right Terry Eastland provided an excellent critique ("Hill's Rats," TAS, July 1992) of the news coverage of the "iron triangle" of liberal Senate staffers, interest groups, and reporters that tried to stop Justice Thomas's nomination...
...I don't think so...
...However, I read the book not as a feminist tract, but as an allegory on the terminal inanity of liberalism...
...He seems to have misread the book...
...No such places existed...
...I think Bob Tyrrell is quite right to suggest that bureaucratic intercessions have worsened urban pathologies of poverty, crime, and dependency, and that our streets were safer, schools better, and families stronger under the aegis of machine politics...
...Other polygraph experts later reviewed Minor's work and found his methodology to be seriously flawed and his results to be wrong...
...In this "60 Minutes" age, we can't go back to corrupt, albeit effective, patronage politics...
...Another victory for Jesse Jackson, and Nelson Mandela...
...About twenty years ago, as McFadden says, this once-respected agency began to fall apart, and reports became obviously partisan and predictable...
...On the perimeter of Havana is a park that displays two bronze plaques embedded in granite showing two readily identifiable profiles...
...Not that I'm an Oates fan...
...Jim Reid San Gabriel, CaliforniaP.S...
...At the press conference on October 13, 1991, when Professor Hill's lawyers announced the results of the polygraphtest, Minor was asked, "Have you had cases where you later found out that the polygraph did not accurately report...
...As Tammany stalwart George Washington Plunkitt once told a reporter: "If a family is burned out...
...attorney in California who had been accused of accepting a bribe...
...Bethell's beat has been California, very far from Washington, D.C...
...Tyrrell's shrewd, persuasive editorial will help re-invigorate debate on the subject...
...Podhoretz says about her hysterical, cliché-ridden style is true...
...Most Cuban-Americans have already pulled half their hair out by the roots and ground their teeth down to the nubs from the blizzard of idiocy we have to endure about Cuba in every magazine article and TV documentary that touches on the subject in this country...
...but his sense that lack of combat would lead to lack of promotion made him resign to broaden them further as a banker, lawyer, and first president of LSU...
...No wonder that, as Thomas Sowell writes in Ethnic America, "the poor usually ended up preferring corrupt politicians, who understood them, to distant theorists, who did not...
...David Price Washington, D. C. Who's the Boss...
...John Woolley Arlington, Virginia A GAO Whistleblower Bravo for Edward McFadden and his article on the General Accounting Office ("There's No Accounting for Congress," TAS, July 1992...
...Frank's later admissions made it clear that Gobie's statements were accurate...
...I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up 'til they get things running agin...
...the same general intelligence objectives . . . as obtained in, e.g., 1982, when the KGB went by its familiar name...
...I read "Unheavenly Cities" (TAS, July 1992) with great interest...
...There are potentially much worse consequences than just partisanship...
...Further, it was Sherman who pointed out what no biographer of Davis has since seemed willing to face: all Davis's representative rant about the Honor of the South was given the lie on its own terms by his willingness to run in the election of 1860 but to abide by its results only if he were successful...
...And look where it gets her...
...Patrick Symmes writes that "one of the worst sins of the Batista regime was that it allowed privileged enclaves where Cubans worked only as busboys and (continued on page 70) 12 The American Spectator September 1992 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 12) prostitutes" ("Fidel's World," TAS, July 1992...
...CORRESPONDENCE Down to Size Michael Fumento displays a profound misunderstanding when he says, in "Fetal Attraction" (TAS, July 1992), that we pro-lifers "believe that the more developed the fetus, the more heinous the act" of abortion...
...Now we read it in your magazine—one of the few places intelligent people can seek solace...
...Haselkorn describes intelligence infilitrations that could only have been accomplished through these same decades of patient penetration: programs started in the sixties, seventies, and eighties...
...One of these, he notes, was set up in 1967, and yet "remained active after the disintegration of the Soviet Union...
...The disappearance coincided with a new GAO emphasis on "Performance Audits"—not audits so much as judgments on the effectiveness of programs...
...He has them down cold, and it is only too bad this has not been said before and louder...
...Those papers were the only ones to mention that the examiner, Paul Minor, had previously bungled two other high-profile cases...
...Humberto E. Fontova Covington, Louisiana I would like to add two observations to Patrick Symmes's very fine and accurate article...
...A salute for Avigdor Haselkorn's rundown of continuing "former KGB" espionage in Western Europe ("Why Spy...
...One case, in 1980, involved a U.S...
...But we also can't stay where we are...
...When we started to enter the Cuba Libre hotel, the police started to converge until it was apparent he was with us...
...Surely it hasn't escaped the notice of TAS's editorial staff that for quite a while Mr...
...So where is the democratization...
...I was told the name of the park is the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Memorial, in honor of these revolutionary heroes...
...everything Mr...
...Which means people who applauded Fidel for the first few years...
...He thus did not share the geographical and intellectual narrowness of viewpoint that Johnson notes in Sherman's strategic opponent Davis, who did fight in Mexico before becoming a politician...
...The entire logic of our position hangs precisely on the insight that the morality of killing does not depend on the age or size of the person being killed...
...In no upscale restaurants, shops, clubs, including the Tropicana, did I see any black customers, although the majorities were Latin, mostly Cuban...
...Which are two ways of saying I liked Black Water better than he did (Book Reviews, TAS, July 1992...
...In the 1960s, GAO and other government auditors were respected and feared...
...Not all of the fault lies with misinformed Americans, however...
...Kelly, after all, is seduced not by the Senator's looks or personality, both of which are presented as singularly repulsive, but by his politics...
...the same organizational and management structures...
...Sometime during the Carter Administration, I began betting with fellow employees: you tell me the title of the report and which congressman requested it and I will tell you the conclusions...
...I'm aware that Oates might not have meant it that way, but there it is...
...We expect a break from the Spectator...
...Which means people usually belonging to the "Revolution-betrayed" school of thought...
...Which means people who don't want to appear like complete fools now...
...Blacks are notably absent from the leadership, and I do not recall seeing any blacks in traversing at least three floors of displays and photos...
...I don't refer them to the Charity Organization Service...
...Minor concluded the man was lying...
...In 1989, Minor conducted a polygraph test on male prosititute Stephen Gobie, and concluded that Gobie was lying about his relationship with Rep...
...Wild Oates John Podhoretz is a little harsh on Joyce Carol Oates...
...Entrance to most places was based on skin color...
...I have yet to lose...
...The same attitude began to be shown toward internal audits...
...In effect it means the system of checks and balances has been corrupted to the point of disappearing...
Vol. 25 • September 1992 • No. 9
