TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...sometimes much more...

...A few recent headlines tell the story: "Housing Crisis Grips LowIncome Women—Higher Rents Put the Squeeze on the Poor"—The Washington Post...

...Builders indulge in mansion mania as rich get richer"— Raleigh News and Observer...

...My suspicions grew more acute when I learned that one of the most frequently canceled flights is the Eastern Shuttle's last—and usually least patronized—flight of the day...

...You are, by the way, more likely to have a flight canceled by Eastern than by any other airline...

...But why not take it, why not get into work that's interesting and worthwhile instead of boring or morally marginal, as is the case with most of the work in private practice...

...He was helped by the fact that the press let him get away with not having the press conferences in which so many of his past mistakes had been made...

...But today's prominent journalists are making too much money to risk losing it...

...The most accurate portrayal I have yet seen of what romance between Washington careerists is really like came in the recent television film "Favorite Son...

...He is also forcing the U.S...

...During the fiscal year ending in June it was sued 213 times and was forced to pay a total of $42 million in settlements and jury verdicts...

...4) the increasing tendency of the upwardly mobile to establish their social class by means of visible symbols of consumption from fancy cars to fancy houses...

...Bush's sensitivity to criticism, by the way, is great...

...In presidential campaigns where the difference between the candidates seems slim, as in the Carter-Ford race, the press tends to focus on gaffes, and I thought Bush would supply them with far more ammunition than Dukakis...

...Army to buy 3,849 trucks it doesn't want...

...By contrast, Bush seemed masterful...

...What's happening in housing...

...Charles Peters...

...3) by eliminating many other tax shelters, tax reform has had the unintended consequence of encouraging the rich to buy or build increasingly expensive homes, on which they can still get the mortgage interest deduction...

...In a law suit, the state got $112 million in damages from those officials...

...My theory is that he did it by finding a greater wimp in Dan Quayle...

...Speaking of the morally marginal, Les Aspin, the congressman who holds the world's record for issuing press releases praising his efforts to slash Pentagon spending, recently had an air force plane fly him to the number-one college football game of the year, Miami vs...

...The four main reasons for this infuriating situation seem to be 1) the savings and loan industry, in the early eighties, began to emphasize go-go investments like oil wells and junk bonds and to neglect its traditional role as the financer of housing for the average man...

...Now comes a new publication called The Prune Book, which lists 116 such positions...

...And of course, everyone who wants to be a White House correspondent has been making sure that he or she doesn't irritate Bush...

...We need a revival of real Christianity...

...In the old days, there was among reporters a strong tradition of thumbing one's nose at the boss...

...I was in Los Angeles that day, heard the debate on the radio, read the contemporary news accounts of it, and talked to people who had been there...

...How did the television people know this...

...Kennedy was witty, charming, and in almost total command...

...But my words had barely been written when Dukakis got in that tank...

...The latter two appear to have been crucial in this election...

...on most every block, older models are being torn down and replaced by homes of 5,000 square feet, 10,000 square feet, 15,000 square feet and more...

...This is one kind of litigation I favor...

...And there seems to be no question that Dukakis was in part responsible for the condition of the harbor...

...And the salaries paid by these jobs—mostly in the $60,000 to $80,000 range—permit a comfortable, if not lavish, life in Washington, especially if they put the kids through school while they were pulling in all that loot at the firm...

...The Republicans knew what my friend knew and a couple of weeks later staged a very effective campaign event, with Bush touring the harbor and bemoaning its condition...

...Examples are Chief of the Forest Service, Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, and Assistant Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs, where we desperately need someone capable of cleaning up the mess that has become of the nuclear weapons program...

...Far better to sit around the hearth watching MTV and munching popcorn...

...Of course, if the family has grown accustomed to a Jaguar and a BMW, a Taurus and an Escort are going to seem a step down...

...But as for most of the suits clogging the courts, my feelings are different...

...The liberal intellectuals just love to think the average man is a bigot so that they won't give him a chance not to be by showing liberals are willing to be tough on black criminals...

...I think there is something about Dole's intellectual superiority that drives Bush crazy, so that the tapes very well might have driven him to commit the gaffe the Democrats waited and waited for during the campaign...

...In his first term as governor, he delayed building waste treatment facilities that were needed to clean up the harbor and to comply with the federal Clean Water Act...

...They started their careers with a government agency...

...It, too, has not been well reported during the campaign...

...Since the average man disagrees, these liberals are having a hard time winning elections...

...Kempton is one of my heroes, but in this case he got it dead wrong, as did Krauthammer, by relying on just one source...

...Bush on the other hand managed to shed the wimp image from the convention on...

...Too many liberals seem to think that you have to be antiblack to be anticrime and that it is vulgar to be openly patriotic...

...As for the government jobs—below the well-known ones at the top—those Washington lawyers should be trying to fill, we listed seven in our October issue...

...Besides, as one Massachusetts official explained to Robert Jones of the Los Angeles Times, "Environmental issues are not a personal passion with Dukakis...

...NViy should the government bail out the savings and loans and the banks...

...Washington's Metro system has had few serious accidents, but that doesn't mean it doesn't get sued a lot...

...But only on the condition that the banks and savings and loans gradually repay those sums through increased contributions to the insurance funds...

...The orangutans looked happy to me...

...Another factor in the Bush victory is that most of the lords of the press did not lean toward Dukakis, so that all the careerists on their reporting staffs—and their number is legion—got the message that they would not get any kind of leg-up by blowing the whistle on Bush or Quayle...

...The word prune is used because the jobs are tough, but they also offer the potential for real accomplishment and satisfaction...

...For the next target of our efforts to reduce armaments, I suggest we try to get rid of the tactical nuclear weapons that, according to Bernard J. O'Keefe, chairman of the International Task Force on Nuclear Terrorism, are strewn all over Western Europe, "where they are susceptible to theft, sabotage, accidental detonation or premature use...

...If the industry had a good record of warning the public about the bad apples, then it might be reasonable to ask the public to share more of the bail-out burden...

...Kempton wrote, "Flogged and whimpering, Kennedy bit it off and departed...

...The Trend in Homes: Build `to the Max'—Only a Manse Will Do for the Luxury Seekers"—Las Angeles Times...

...Christianity has been corrupted by the shameless upward mobility of the Jim and Tammys and the narrow-minded selfishness of the Jerry Falwells...

...But now the orangutans were being sent back to the jungle...

...That, to me, is the central message of Cooper's article on Dickens...

...Notre Dame...

...If, on the other hand, he had selected Robert Dole, everyone would have been reminded every day that his vice presidential candidate was smarter than Bush...

...As for Bush, the big question has to be how did he suddenly stop being a wimp...

...But the industry record in this regard is dismal...

...It is the liberal intellectual's disdain for the average man's views on religion, crime, and patriotism...

...The idea behind the two deposit insurance funds, FSLIC and FDIC, is for the industry to insure itself against its bad apples...

...But a few days after my advice appeared, a friend, who is a Boston reporter, wrote me and said, "He can't do that because of Boston Harbor...

...Guess where Aspin's constituents live...

...How could a man earning $350,000 a year accept a role below the cabinet or at least the sub-cabinet level...

...A single explosion," writes O'Keefe, "would be a thousand Chernobyls...

...His reply: "If I was dwelling on all that, I wouldn't be able to afford to send my kids to private school...

...households with incomes of $50,000-$100,000 give 1.5 percent, barely more than half the percentage donated by the poor...

...The absolutely unquestioned assumption was that the orangutans would be happier back in nature...

...And, of course, the Democrats could have been counted on to play tapes of Dole ridiculing Bush during the primaries...

...The best way to finance the bail-outs is for the government to lend the insurance funds the sums that are needed...

...He began, "I come here today full of admiration for Senator Johnson, full of affection for him, strongly in support of him—for majority leader...

...It is well known that tort litigation, in which an injured person in effect sues an insurance company, has been undergoing explosive growth...

...When they say your flight has been canceled and you look around and notice only a dozen or so people in the waiting area, do you ever suspect, as I must confess I do, that the airline has used an alleged mechanical or weather problem as an excuse not to fly a flight that would have been unprofitable...

...What is most depressing is that the liberal positions on these issues are usually at least half wrong— just because, for example, most right-wingers are antiblack, and anticrime doesn't mean that liberals can't be problack and anticrime—and if reexamined could give liberals a basis for reaching out to the rest of the country so that they can win elections and advance the great causes they are mostly right about...

...But then they left, convinced they needed to make enough money in private practice to afford to return to government later on...

...The hazard of trying to write history when you weren't there was illustrated last month by Charles Krauthammer, who, in discussing the Dan QuayleJohn Kennedy comparison, quoted a July 1960 Murray Kempton column about a Johnson-Kennedy debate before a joint meeting of the Texas and Massachusetts delegation attending the Democratic National Convention that year...

...But each year, as their earnings from private practice rose, these lawyers found that there were fewer and fewer government jobs appropriate to their present station in life...

...Now I must face the fact that in our September issue I predicted Michael Dukakis would win...

...The trucks are made in Wisconsin...

...Many of the finest Washington lawyers came here because they dreamed of working in government...

...The issue on which I urged Dukakis to try to unite the country was the environment...

...2) government programs for low-cost housing have been underfunded and ineptly administered...

...So it appears that with the clogging of the courts as with so many of our other national problems, there may be many villains but corporate America is number one...

...The tragedy is that there are thousands of interesting and challenging government jobs that these people would enjoy filling if it weren't for the injury to their sense of status...

...It was about some orangutans who had been domesticated and were living on a farm with a family of human beings...

...One thing the federal government can and should do is go after the bank and savings and loan officials responsible for recklessly conducting the affairs of the bad-apple institution...

...Between 1960 and 1986 tort suits in federal court increased by 114 percent, while contract cases grew by 258 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal's Paul M. Barrett...

...And after being guilty of overkill on Dan Quayle for the week or so after his selection in August—recall the absurd stakeout of Quayle's home—the press laid off for the rest of the campaign instead of hammering away at Quayle's bubble-headedness, and at Bush's atrocious judgment in choosing him, as it should have...

...We need another King who will, in addition to preaching racial tolerance, scorn greed and inspire a great movement dedicated to service...

...But did you realize that contract cases, usually involving an effort by one company to extract money from another, have grown even more...

...My reasoning was that Dukakis had run an errorfree campaign during the primaries, while Bush had often seemed foolish...

...I predict that it will be a serious problem during his presidency...

...The State of Maryland did just that in the case of the executives of Community Savings and Loan of Bethesda, which the state had to bail out because of the mismanagement by its owners...

...Martin Luther King gave us an unforgettable reminder of the power Christ's true message can have today...

...The Times reports that in such moneyed Southern California communities as Brentwood, Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, and Pacific Palisades "it no longer suffices to own a $1 million or $2 million home...

...Patrick J. Christmas, an attorney, says, "If we get less than $100,000 in fees from Metro it hasn't been a good year for us...

...In one scene, after Senator Terry Fallon has committed sodomy—"no, no, not that way, Terry"—on his beautiful aide, Sally Cain, she rises from the couch, straightens her clothes, and says, "Now, about that amendment to House bill 122...

...Further evidence of our need for a new Dickens that Matthew Cooper points out in this issue: According to The Wall Street Journal, households with incomes under $10,000 make charitable donations of 2.8 percent of their incomes...

...They might very well have thought it really was a jungle out there in the jungle, and they didn't want any part of it...

...Since most of the suits are for bumps and bruises, Christmas was asked whether these cases were in the public interest...

...I would have played those tapes anyway...

...His task was delicate—to win the debate without so offending LBJ that Johnson might refuse to support him in the coming election...

...It may be that their mobility will soon be shifting direction and heading downward, at least in the District of Columbia, where Kirstin Downey of The Washington Post reports that so many expensive houses have been built that there is now a "mansion glut...

...Dukakis, for his part, was handicapped by a defect of modern liberalism that has long troubled this magazine...