Tilting at Windmills

...And speaking of coincidental travel, Gerald W. Frank, an administrative assistant to Senator Mark Hatfield, lives in Oregon and commutes to Washington, D.C...

...Thus the new principle that the Court today announces will be entered by a corps of judges (the members of this court included) who overwhelmingly owe their office to its violation...

...But you can’t ask him a third time...

...How edifying it must have been for all the children to see their pin-striped elders ashen with anxiety about how to cover up their misdeeds and avoid indictment and incarceration...

...But doesn’t this story really tell us what spoiled children most Americans have become during the real estate boom of the past 30 years...

...By odd coincidence, Frank’s official taxpayer-financed travel during the past five years has, according to Portland’s KATU-TV, included 52 visits to New York City...

...The result has been the proliferation of self-perpetuating bureaucracies in which comparative merit is determined by credentials or written tests that have at best a marginal relationship to the actual ability to perform the job involved, or, in the many cases where inside influence plays a role in hiring or promotion, by the “buddy” rather than the political system of patronage...

...Finally, because the parties don’t have patronage, they have little power...

...If you doubt me, consider the advertising done by Victoria’s Secret...

...Helen’s...

...The princes and their courtiers reside, in the words of Andrew Borowiec of The Washington Times, “in the quiet elegance of a luxury hotel” in a mountain resort where “the air is cool and pure,” and “where silent waiters incessantly fill tiny cups with scented coffee...

...Neither was Korea or Vietnam, even though Douglas MacArthur and Lyndon Johnson tried to convince us the stakes were of similar magnitude in both places...

...The sight brought gasps of disbelief-it looked,” said the Times, “like ground zero at a nuclear explosion...

...In West Virginia, we waited until it was too late, until many counties had been damaged beyond nature’s capacity to repair within our lifetimes...

...If that can’t be arranged I think we should still withdraw our ground forces and devote our energies to thinking of ways to make Saddam Hussein’s life miserable without risking the lives of thousands of our troops...

...I would hate to think that I had to hire people to work at this magazine solely on the basis of their competence and without regard to their commitment to the aims and ideals that are at the heart of the Monthly...

...Oregonians, save your state while there’s still time...

...about twice a month...

...I later learned that in August the Wisconsin’s cruise missiles, if launched, would have been as likely to hit Cairo as Baghdad...

...I would like to speak to them from the heart right now and say: Why not seize this opportunity to join the new administration and do work you can be proud of...

...Six judges were photographed as they were making their exit...

...As a matter of fact there happen to be hundreds of talented lawyers in this city who are doing work that, if it is not actually demeaning, is certainly not something they will be eager to tell their children and grandchildren about...

...It was the seventh time in seven months he had been required to repeat this process...

...Recently, Nancy Lewis of The Washington Post followed an applicant through the center...

...Frank Johnson, a spokesperson for the Defense Personnel Support Center, defended the uniforms as more durable and better suited to a war in Europe...

...He also publishes an annual “New York City Travel Guide...

...Dixon needs some good lawyers, not only to straighten out the Supreme Court but for the other important missions discussed in Shuger’s article...

...Nonproductive” time, the time spent on coffee breaks and similar activities, has tripled in the Postal Service over the past 20 years, according to a report by The Washington Post’s Dana Priest...

...The decisions were the product of a tendency that has been growing steadily over the past century among respectable liberals and conservatives to place their faith not in officials elected by the people but in tenured civil servants, who are not accountable to the people...

...Were they all supposed to be in temperate zones...

...But even back then, as Dean Rusk points out in As I Saw It, there were some notable pioneers in the realm of arrogance: Soon after he took office as secretary of state, Rusk says, “both Walter Lippmann and Arthur Krock sent me messages that, if I wanted to call on them, they would be glad to receive me...

...Speaking of our troops in the Middle East, those who had to endure the scorching desert heat during August and September should sue every officer who has held a responsible position in military supply since 1983...

...I know that this prejudice is so strong that at this very moment many of my readers are saying “Charlie, do you mean to tell me you are for hiring a bunch of incompetent political hacks...

...The reason, he explained, is now that the bar association rules permit lawyers to advertise, the fellows don’t have to run for office in order to make themselves known to potential clients...

...What kind of conference does corporate America feel so urgently meets its needs that it will cough up $995 per person to have its executives attend...

...Wait a minute,” he replied, “we’re not at the volcano yet, this is just a clear cut...

...So now large sums have to be raised to pay professional campaign workers...

...The Boston Globe recently looked into the time of day when the judges who are always telling you how overworked they are actually depart from the court house...

...Will this be true whenever we need these weapons...

...So I just nod my head, but I didn’t know what he was actually saying...

...The Far Left has long contended that America got suckered into the Korean War because the conflict was provoked not by the North but by the South...

...If you recall, we have been spending hundreds of billions on a military budget that for many years was geared to fighting two-and-a-half wars...

...By losing their sense of perspective MacArthur and Johnson caused bloodbaths, the former by crossing the 38th parallel in the fall of 1950, and the latter by sending ground forces into Vietnam in the summer of 1965...

...But from the qualified applicants, shouldn’t an official be able to choose those who are dedicated to helping him carry out his program...

...M a y b e you’ve heard this story that environmentalists tell, but I hadn’t until I saw it in a recent Los Angeles Times: was flying to see the damage caused by the eruption of Mount St...

...Now that Scalia’s reasoning has been applauded by such eminences as David Broder and George Will, one can’t help but think the other respectables won’t be far behind...

...Certainly there is a case to be made for a small core of civil servants, not just to show the new fellows where the bathrooms are, but to carry the lessons of experience from one administration to another...

...Because applicants are allowed to get only two permits at a time and the offices close at 3 p.m., he had to come back the next day to get the remaining permits he needed...

...There is no reason why we cannot require that political appointees be able to do a job...

...You can ask him twice...

...What does democracy mean if not that we can change the government with our votes...

...The self-importance of Washington journalists has grown steadily since I arrived here in 1961...

...During the week of the Kuwait invasion, as I was trying to think of the kind of military force we could use that would not risk a lot of American lives, it occurred to me that cruise missiles fired at Iraqi targets from afar seemed to fill the bill...

...It looked like the moon, or hell...

...Since the founding of this magazine, we have been largely alone in arguing the pro-patronage position...

...Strategies for Preventing White Collar Criminal and Civil Prosecution” charged precisely that sum for the October 25 and 26 sessions at Disney World...

...We have come to think that Natural Law demands that we get the highest price the market attained during that period even though the prices seemed absurdly high at the time and even though many of us, like the California couple, could still realize almost unbelievable multiples of our original investment by selling at today’s stillgenerousif-somewhat-reducedfromtheir-peak prices...

...Troops in Saudi Arabia are wearing the same uniforms...

...Arriving just after 9 a.m., he found himself 43rd in line...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS Charles Peters Those who think money has to be decisive in politics should ponder the example of Sharon Pratt Dixon, who won the Democratic nomination for mayor of the District of Columbia by spending just $5.38 per voter...

...Something must be wrong here and I suggest it is the court...

...The October 1 issue of Newsweek contains a touching tale of an elderly couple in California who, needing money to meet the problems of age, want to sell their house but are unable to get their $285,000 asking price because of the decline in real estate prices...

...The exact times of departure were 3:33 p.m., 3:20 p.m., 2:35 p.m., 12:05 p.m., 12:Ol p.m., and 11: 10 a.m...

...Now you can ask a person to repeat himself once...

...But when a government has become as inept as the District of Columbia’s, its leader should have wide latitude to clean house from top to bottom...

...The answer is no...

...The inspiring moral leadership of the American Bar has never been more manifest than in a Delaware Superior Court where Michael Nussbaum, an attorney with the firm of Nussbaum & Wald of Washington, D.C., arguing in behalf of lawyers who were accused of misleading the court, conceded that telling the truth in civil litigation “is, of course, a very attractive proposition,” but went on to say, “it is not the way the system operates in litigation in this country...

...Two hours later, he reached the information desk and two hours after that he was able to get two permits...

...In 1988, for example, such farmers, with an average net income of $96,000 per year, received 43 percent of the agricultural subsidies...

...The crisis in the Gulf is not the Battle of Britain...

...Do you suspect that one of those mumbles might have proposed the Iran-contra plot...

...Speaking of spokespersons, when Mary Crawford, the one for the Small Business Administration, was asked if it was not a bit suspicious that 23 of 30 official business trips taken by the agency’s administrator, Susan S. Engeleiter, happened to be to or near her hometown of Minneapolis, she told The Washington Times: “You can paint any type of picture you want and for every picture you paint, someone else could paint a thousand other pictures...

...An agreement allowing American tobacco companies to sell cigarettes in Thailand...

...What’s more, they all use spokesspeak, a language thaf is deeply rooted in memospeak where “appropriate” is king and “constructive discussions” are the princes of the realm...

...As a West Virginian who saw his state raped by ship miners, I was horrified on my first visit to Oregon a couple of years ago to see the same destructive scars created by clear-cutting...

...The article attaches no significance to the fact that the couple has rejected an offer of $200,000 even though they paid only $14,000 for the house when they bought it...

...Wow,” they said to their guide...

...White House Wins Victory at G A T ’ proclaimed an October headline in The New York Times...

...It is, as Justice Scalia pointed out in his dissent, “rare that a Federal administration of one party will appoint a judge from another party...

...In his new biography of William Casey, Joseph Persico quotes Ronald Reagan as saying this about Casey’s habit of mumbling: “My problem with Bill was that I didn’t understand him at meetings...

...And because officials who are elected are not free to choose as subordinates those who believed in their programs enough to have campaigned for them, the officials have to accept subordinates from the civil service who are indifferent to their programs...

...Of course, there have always been press secretaries at the White House, but the notion that each bureaucratic unit must have its own mouthpiece did not take hold until Hodding Carter was on the news as the State Department spokesman almost every night during the Iran hostage crisis...

...Still, the power of the conventional prejudice against patronage is so great that arguments against it were not even mentioned until the 13th and 17th paragraphs of the two stories about the case that appeared in The New York Times, and were not mentioned at all in The Associated Press story that appeared in The Washington Times...

...Snobbery is now more powerful than sex...

...Her four opponents spent $15.76, $29.89, $34.43, and $35.33 respectively...

...It used to be firmly in the Frederick’s of Hollywood tradition, but it is steadily moving toward the elite atmosphere favored by Ralph Lauren and-if volume of advertising provides any indication of prosperity-the firm appears to be flourishing...

...s peaking of spokespersons again, have you noticed that almost every governmental unit in America now has one...

...I mention this because it corrects a long held conviction not only of the Far Left, but of most liberals who came of age in the Vietnam era and assumed that Korea had been just another pointless war that our macho militarists had gotten us into...

...A few weeks ago I was having dinner with an old friend from West Virginia who knows the local political situation well...

...And because the cost of wages has gone up during the period, the cost to the government of paying employees for not working rose from $118 million in 1969 to $1.82 billion in 1989...

...A mong the many reasons we should switch to the Canadian health care system is this fact from a study conducted by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services: Medicaid paid $474 million more for prescriptions than it would have paid under the Canadian system...

...But the most recent Supreme Court decision last spring seems to have awakened at least some of the respectables to the smug stupidity that characterized its reasoning...

...I hope they will be quickly replaced by a largely Arab multinational force in which we play no more than a minor role...

...Korea was a clear case of aggression, about which we were right to take a stand just as we are right today to oppose Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait...

...For it was then that our troops in Grenada first complained that their uniforms-made of material that was half nylon-were intensely uncomfortable in a hot climate...

...But even in a just cause, we need to keep a sense of proportion...

...A plane loaded with reporters The one problem with Senator ,Howell Heflin’s description of Republicans as “the Grey Poupon crowd, the Gucci-poochie-coochie shoe-wearing, Mercedes-driving, polo-playing, Jacuzzi-soaking, Pemer-drinking, Aspen-skiing, ritzy-rich,” is that it also applies to an unfortunately large number of chic liberal Democrats...

...I used to want to hurl a book at the TV as Carter droned on...

...Under the buddy system, you get the job not because you have worked in a campaign, but because you live next door to a civil servant who gives you advance notice of a vacancy and gives you sophisticated advice on how to tailor your application to the job description-and sometimes even tailors the job description itself-so that you are the one selected...

...The vacuum has been filled by the political action committees controlled by special interests...

...While our troops were broiling in the Arabian desert during August and September, where were the brave leaders of Kuwait they had been sent to restore to power...

...He began with, “Well, there’s the Wisconsin...

...I said I had noticed that there had been a marked decline in the number of lawyers in the state legislature since I had served there in 196162...

...An unfortunate byproduct of the civil-servicing of America is that political parties can no longer reward those who work in campaigns with jobs...

...What was this triumph...

...Judge Walter Hurley, who went home at 12:20 p.m., was described by the Globe as “leaving a courtroom so silent and empty that his court officer was able to lie down on a bench and nap the afternoon away...

...Now the Moscow News has published an interview with Li Sancho, a former North Korean ambassador to the Soviet Union, who says that the invasion was “carefully prepared” by the North...

...Did you know that almost half of all farm subsidies go to the affluent...

...George Bush has repeated Johnson’s error by sending ground forces to Saudi Arabia...

...Clearly, Ms...

...Many of them actually started out with high ideals and have lost their way...

...You start to sound rude...

...Seven years ago, Marion Barry unveiled a reform that substituted a one-stop center for the eight different places contractors and homeowners had to go to get construction permits...

...The reason: the permits run for only 30 days each...

...o n eof the problems Sharon Pratt Dixon is going to have in carrying out her promise to get rid of 2,000 District employees (see Scott Shuger’s article on p. 41) is a series of Supreme Court decisions beginning with Elrod v. Burns that say that public employees can’t be hired or fired for political reasons-the latter, incredibly, even if they were originally patronage employees-unless they are clearly in policy-making positions...

...But I didn’t know how well off I was...

...I’m sure that if you had a complaint about your garbage it would be answered with an artfully evasive response from a spokesperson for the Refuse Collection Administration...

...So I asked a Navy veteran I know what ships we had that could fire cruise missiles...

...It seems that it would take about a month for our spy cameras to take the photographs needed to compose the electronic maps needed to guide the missiles...

...Margaret Tutwiler makes him seem like a model of clarity and crispness...