Tilting at Windmills

...The impeachment speeches were mostly written by Renata Adler of The New Yorker...

...He is, after all, one of the great reporters of our time...

...The thrust of the item we ran about Clines was why did the CIA hire people like him and Edwin P. Wilson, who is now serving time in a federal prison...

...American business seems finally to have grasped the point of this story and has begun to get rid of the fat around its middle...

...I'm suspicious of studies like this, wondering how on earth something like insecurity can be measured, but there is no question that too many mothers and fathers are too busy at their work to take care of their children...

...The only change it made in this regard was to require that you use the yacht at least 14 days a year...

...The words "tentatively" and "possible" merit careful pondering by students of bureaucratese...

...Speaking of Fawn Hall, if you need further proof that we have a celebrity culture in which what counts is that you've become famous, not what you did to get there, you should know that Hall was an honored guest at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association...

...If they write about issues they just might reveal what they don't know...

...D id you know that a yacht can be counted as a second home for purposes of getting a federal tax deduction...

...He was a productive, happy worker, but alas, he was unsupervised...

...In other words, if they knew they were doing wrong, they wouldn't do it...

...Another is a course called "Meeting People at the Great Museums," taught by a New Yorker named William Quinn...

...Some of the editors also have a condescending attitude toward the quality of Mintz's prose...

...Because they are by and large the former staff members from Congress, and bureaucrats from the GAO and OPM who were responsible for putting the program together...

...The inhuman absurdity of that statement becomes clear when one learns from The Wall Street Journal that almost half of the children in this country who are legally available for adoption are black...

...If you wonder why an otherwise crusading newspaper seems uncharacteristically indulgent about the sins of the mayor or the county officials, you might check to see what the paper's assessment is...

...There is an important bureaucratic truth in William J. Ward's "The Happy Worker," which recently appeared in Management Review...

...One is that there is anti-union sentiment among the top people at the Post...

...Rather than be thought not in the know about matters before Congress, the respondents lied...

...In April, it developed that the true figure was 12...

...Nurses are important in the American medical system because too many physicians have become impersonal as they rush from patient to patient in their relentless pursuit of the money for a second Mercedes...

...The great minds who are charged with defending this nation against its enemies decided that if the sinking caused less than $700 damage to the vehicle, it didn't count it as a sinking...

...If you're a federal personnel specialist responsible for explaining FERS to your agency's employees, relax: these firms will be delighted to send a consultant out to give a comprehensive lecture on pensions and answer questions from the floor...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS When senators asked William Webster why he had repeatedly failed to have the FBI follow up on warnings that Lt...

...And, if my own marriage is at all typical, they're often too tired at the end of the day to give one another the minimum nurturing that even adults need...

...My friend Morton Mintz says he does not think that the poor placement of his stories in The Washington Post has anything to do, as I contended in April, with his union activities...

...But the special twist here is that the better these consultants do their jobs, the higher the cost of federal pensions...

...In late April, Lawrence E. Walsh, the special prosecutor, announced that Clines was a "principal" in his investigation and urged congressional investigators not to grant him immunity from prosecution...

...White parents should not be permitted to adopt black children, according to the National Association of Black Social Workers, which has successfully lobbied to cut in half the number of such adoptions in the past 15 years...

...It has some justification—remember the bombing of the press room a decade ago...

...Its director consulted a consultant...

...According to a study conducted by Professor Jay Belsky of Pennsylvania State University, young children who spend more than 20 hours a week in day-care facilities are twice as insecure as other children their age...

...If all this wasn't bad enough, April was also the month when we learned from Robert Kelley of CarnegieMellon University's business school that between 2 and 3 percent of the entire working force in the United States is now involved in consulting...

...Having thought the chickens we eat have been inspected by the Department of Agriculture, we learn that only 0.07 percent are inspected closely, and that 37 percent of all chickens on the market contain salmonella bacteria, which can make you very sick or even kill you...

...Another example comes from George Bishop of the Behavioral Science Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, who conducted a public opinion poll about several pieces of legislation, including the Monetary Control Act and the 1975 Public Affairs Act...

...July 1 to December 31 of this year is the "open season," during which current federal employees hired before 1984 and covered by the old Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) can choose to switch over to the new Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS), which covers the newly hired...

...In Mintz's case, there are at least three factors that go into the mixture of motives that result in his articles appearing on page 32...

...Let me review three horror stories that came out just in the month of April...

...Once upon a time," the article begins, "in a company far, far away there was a worker...

...You may recall that in our March issue we reported that Thomas Clines, a former CIA official, appeared to be involved in Irangate...

...That's one of the loopholes last year's Tax Reform Act didn't plug...

...Friends often ask me why I write so much about The Washington Post...

...But these Wall Streeters are already rich...

...I have previously urged moral reform and a career in public school teaching on all those brilliant hotshots who are currently corrupting themselves on Wall Street...

...At the IRS, for example, a congressional task force recently found that 16,900 new working-level employees, such as auditors and telephone answerers, are needed if the agency is to do its job properly...

...The course teaches you," one of Quinn's students told William E. Geist of The New York Times„ "how to sound halfway intelligent about art when you're not ." "If they're at a dinner party and start talking about the Modigliani heads being inspired by Brancusi," Quinn explained to Geist, "other people at the table pay attention to them...

...Finally, there is the curious indifference to consumer protection that for years led to the Post's placing stories about the recall of defective products in the Business Section along with the stock market news...

...Fairness requires that I concede the Post doesn't always bury Mintz in the back of the paper, but it does so far too often...

...The popularity of put-down humor is one example...

...Getting rich in private practice on knowledge gained in public service is nothing new to Washington...

...This is especially true at the IRS, the FAA, and the Postal Service...

...It is in the case of the press that I find this desire to appear hip to be the most damaging...

...The consultant said there were too many employees, so the director fired the productive, happy worker...

...So were John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane...

...Knowing art indicates breeding and sophistication, like knowing wine...

...Today, if anyone cares about the personal feelings of the patient, it is the nurse...

...I can tell you that when we ran an article last summer that was quite critical of Marion Barry, the mayor of the District of Columbia, my mother, who is a veteran West Virginia politician, immediately called to say, "Charlie, you better watch out—your assessment is about to be doubled...

...We consider transracial adoption a form of cultural and racial genocide," says a former president of the organization...

...The hefty fees for such talks are payable out of agency training budgets...

...Further evidence that something has gone wrong with Israel comes from a recent State Department report that singles it out as the worst violator of the international arms embargo against South Africa...

...Belsky speculates that the reason for this may be that a child's "sense of trust, of security, of order in the world" is undermined by daily separation from its parents for substantial periods of time...

...The site in the West, which has not yet been selected, is not scheduled to open until 1998, and the DOE is asking Congress to change the date to 2003...

...The story of how Hall was invited by Mike Kelly of the Baltimore Sun ran in the Los Angeles Times under the headline: A Reporter Pulls Off Social Coup The story quoted Kelly as saying, "My favorite thing of the evening was watching a crowd of allegedly hard-bitten newsmen line up to get Fawn Hall's autograph...

...How do these consultants happen to be so well versed on FERS...

...There is a severe shortage of nurses...

...The answer is contained in our article on the tax reform bill beginning on page 45...

...Not only do participants get a taxdeductible trip to England, they also receive official "Certificates of Attendance," embossed with the Merton College coat of arms, and the comforting knowledge that before long, the word will spread through their hometowns, "He went to Oxford, you know...

...They should now be seeking redemption...

...It is, like the bureaucratic factors we also dwell on, a largely unrecognized player in the game of government...

...The Post seemed more interested in warning investors about how the defective products might affect the companies in which they had stock than in warning consumers of defective products that might endanger their health or even their lives...

...Not surprisingly, a crop of new consulting firms has sprouted in recent months to attend to the hundreds of thousands of anguishing bureaucrats...

...After our nuclear power industry tells us there is no danger of a Chernobyl here, we read that a Philadelphia Electric Company nuclear plant has been shut down because its operators were literally asleep at the switch...

...The best are truly saints...

...Those impetuous rascals at the Department of Energy have, according to the Associated Press, "tentatively set 2007 as the target date for selecting possible sites for a permament nuclear waste repository in the eastern part of the country...

...And, according to UPI, "As much as 90 percent to 100 percent of chickens" released by some plants may be tainted...

...Because we have good reason for being in a constant state of panic...

...The desire to be hip, to be in the know, regardless of whether that knowledge has anything to do with real wisdom, is an especially odious adolescent trait that now appears to be dominant among American adults...

...When it was introduced last year, FERS was hailed as a reform that was supposed to save money, but with enough expert advice, people who have the most to gain by switching to FERS will do so...

...When they sin, the reasons are usually complex enough to be hidden from them...

...The catch was that both bills are fictitious...

...And if the sinking occurred near a river bank, it was called a swamping instead of a sinking...

...I disagree, but I was wrong to suggest that those activities were the only reason...

...So when they do write about them, they write boring synopses of the candidates' platforms—which fulfill the reporters' own prophecies that issues are boring— instead of lively analyses of candidate positions that put into perspective how those positions relate to the major problems of the country and how they don't...

...Oliver North and the White House staff were up to no good in Iran and why, as late as December 14, more than two weeks after Fawn Hall had put in her overtime at the shredding machine, he had said the FBI had "no evidence of the destruction of documents," the man who has directed the FBI for a decade and is now the nominee to head the CIA replied: "I am not an investigative expert...

...But in government, there are still far too many supervisors and far too few people doing the real work...

...Further evidence of the agency's curious personnel policy has now been supplied by Willamette Week, an excellent Village Voice-type publication in Portland, Oregon...

...There is, however, one small problem...

...Just the other day, I finally learned the explanation...

...Send these firms your career history and other data and they'll run it through their computers and tell you which choice is right for you, all for a fee, of course...

...Most political reporters are Jack Germonds—wryly witty, world-weary, not know-italls in an offensive manner, but finally wanting it to appear that they do know it all...

...Most of us thought the danger of air pollution came from breathing fumes of motor vehicles or industrial plants, and that we were safe within the sanctuary of our own homes...

...The DOE says not to worry about this because the repository in the West will be able to handle all the nation's nuclear waste for at least the next 30 years...

...The problem is that finding out whether jumping to FERS will or won't maximize your pension benefits requires complicated formulas, actuarial charts, and knowledge of the intricacies of both plans...

...In Marshall County, West Virginia, a corporation owned by the assessor, one Pinky Clark, was recently revealed to have received a $244,000 loan from a local bank after Clark had reduced the bank's assessment from $1.01 million to $259,700...

...C orruption in state government is usually connected with the construction of public buildings and roads, the acquisition of land for such construction, and the awarding of licenses for race tracks, banks, and liquor sales...

...In county and municipal government, crookedness tends to concentrate in the assessor's office...

...I'm glad I'm no longer a civil servant, if for no other reason than I don't have to agonize over what to do about my pension...

...For years I have been puzzled that similar eloquence has not characterized the chairman's subsequent public addresses...

...When black adoptive parents can't be found, it is cruel to deny these children the chance to be part of a loving family simply because the rest of that family is white...

...I n March, the Army told us that only five of its Bradley fighting vehicles had sunk...

...It is nursing...

...Remember those marvelous speeches Peter Rodino made during the Nixon impeachment hearings...

...This month's Tax Deductible Conference Award is presented to the Bureau of National Affairs for its Oxford Symposium on Comparative Industrial Relations...

...Ward goes on to describe how one administrator, assistant administrator, and administrative assistant after another was hired to oversee the happy worker until the company began to lose money...

...Beneath this appearance there is often a truly colossal intellectual insecurity, which helps explain why, instead of covering the issues, they always turn elections into horse races—who's up and who's down in the polls—and into accounts of gaffes and scandals...

...Now I have another career to suggest to them...

...The owners and editors of the Post are intelligent and decent people who want to do the right thing...

...Charles Peters...

...Now we learn that the house is more dangerous than a Los Angeles freeway...

...How the Post reports on issues such as tax reform often has as much to do with what ultimately is done by the government as what the president or the committee chairman or the cabinet secretary says...

...I trust the rich are maintaining a stiff upper lip as they bear this onerous burden...

...And wouldn't it be better to be a saint than to be another Boesky...

...those who would do better in CSRS will stay, pushing the cost of both systems up...

...The culprits, according to The New York Times, include radon gas, cigarette smoke, formaldehyde (used in furniture and other products), asbestos, carbon monoxide from stoves, household solvents such as paint strippers, and household pesticides like roach poisons...

...Why can't we be relaxed, sane, and free of anxiety...

...Forty-two percent of those interviewed were willing to give an opinion on the latter, 55 percent on the former...

...Why the difference...

...My hunch is that the main cause of domestic disputes is no longer money or sex but disappointment and reproach caused by this mutual failure to nurture...

...One reason is the abysmal pay...

...It discovered that the CIA had offered a job in Central America to Thomas Hudgens, a convicted murderer and drug dealer and one of Oregon's most dangerous criminals...