Tilting at Windmills

...It’s the latest in summer fun for America’s youth: National Law Camp...

...Production was stuck: $281,997 last year, $286,8 13 the year before...

...S uppose you suspect hankypanky in a government agency and want to let the authorities know...

...what made him anxious-even frightenedwas far more serious...

...What secret anxieties does your dentist contemplate in his dreams...

...It begins: “Dear Colleague, He was worried, even afraid...

...A considerable number of them seem convinced that there is some kind of conspiracy of whites to use the legal system to persecute blacks...

...In fact, the average account is less than onetenth of that amount...

...When Marion Barry says that the federal government has a task force singling out black officials for undercover operations, we should say he is lying...

...I have long contended that a major reason the American people allowed the wealthy to get away with so much in the eighties is that the middle class, which during my boyhood in the thirties identified with its poor relatives back on the farm, came to identify with the rich...

...The reserve is now large enough for us to do this for three years, meaning we could sell much more on some days if that is necessary to hold prices at reasonable levels...

...The Italians call it dietrologia...

...options such as these before using military force has to heighten the suspicion that the president really is a wimp who thinks displays of masculinity are more important than genuine strength...

...If an airline’s files indicate that it is maintaining or replacing parts on schedule, “we have to assume the validity of those records,” says a senior FAA official...

...Speaking of how their own wealth is influencing the attitudes of Washington journalists, did you happen to catch Ted Koppel’s interview with William Seidman on August l? When Seidman proposed limiting deposit insurance to $100,000 per individual instead of $100,000 per account, the usually cool Koppel indignantly exploded: “But what if I have $500,000 and you reduce the limit to $lOO,OOO...

...Iraq will not become another Vietnam or Korea because Saddam Hussein will realize that he has no China or Russia to keep replenishing the planes, tanks, and That Bush didn’t explore The one hope I cling to is that on Monday and Friday, the senators could get one week off each month...

...Here was an example of how a weakness of conventional television journalism can play into the hands of rabble-rousers...

...Recently I asked someone I know who had worked closely with George Bush if the president would have nominated David Souter without knowing his views on abortion...

...I’m sure you can spare parts he would lose during a protracted war...

...The fair and reasonable people weren’t there holding press conferences, so their views weren’t aired...

...There is no chance that anywhere near 57 percent of the population has $100,000 in cash to put into a savings account...

...Whether the teacher knew he was going to kill the girl is not clear...

...Remember, I predicted the eighties would usher in a “New Idealism...

...The answer was that they didn’t want to use the reserve to control prices...

...No longer the sound of ball against bat, songs around the fire, frolic in the pool...

...the Office of Management and Budget’s hot line for reporting fraud and abuse did not get an answer until the phone had rung more than 20 times, and then he was told he had reached the White House locker room...

...Both publications have strong readerships among the affluent baby boomers, who have been the principal culprits in the proveclassby-proving-taste-by-buyingexpensiveproducts craze that made all the boomers think they had to get rich and took them in to such morally marginal professions as law and investment banking...

...This conviction is so strong that it can disregard the strongest kind of direct evidence of crime-a tape of Mayor Marion Barry smoking crack and tapes of two confessions in the Central Park jogger case...

...It shows the home of Steve and Cokie Roberts, he of US...

...On June 25, on an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Seattle, a passenger told Patty Young, a flight attendant, that a man had been smoking in the lavatory...

...Many of them, especially those trained at West Point and Annapolis, have solid backgrounds in science and mathematics, which are just the subjects in which there is a desperate shortage of quality instruction in the public schools...

...A journalist who tried to call Do you know how the Texas S&L crooks have escaped efforts to make them pay back the money they looted...

...I wonder how many feminist leaders are equally guilty on the other side, reinforcing the rigidity of their pro-choice sisters while obscuring their own doubts...

...What troubles me is that both Bush and Reagan have repeatedly used rhetoric that could not help but inflame the anti-abortion right...

...The problem is that once presidents begin to favor the military options, they tend to become captives of the generals...

...When Young asked the agent at the gate to call security, the captain intervened, and an apology was made to the passenger, who was asked to fly American again...

...JOIN THE NAVY AND GET A NOSE JOB” read a headline in the June 30 edition of one of my favorite papers, the Sun Jose Mercury News...

...By selling 600 thousand barrels a day from the reserve, the government would replace the supplies we used to get from Iraq and Kuwait...

...But probably the happiest tidings of all are “dropping thousands at a Ralph Lauren boutique has suddenly become excessive with the end of the era of the borrowed life-style...

...Some of the kids are just 13 years old...

...You’ve got a problem...

...Wouldn’t it be better, not to risk lives to make the point, but instead to demonstrate-with economic weapons-that Iraq could not get the higher prices it sought through its takeover of Kuwait...

...I’m on the tightrope and you’ve just shrunk the safety net below me...

...In Korea, this meant that what could have been a successful fivemonth operation, culminating in the restoration of the status quo, became instead a bloody threeyear draw that cost thousands of lives and accomplished absolutely nothing after October 1950...

...ground forces into Saudi Arabia, which seems to ignore the lessons of Vietnam...

...It’s worth $1.2 million...

...Now that the troops are there, I hope Bush will at least remember the lesson of the Korean War, in which an initially justified use of American ground forces to repel an aggressor was transformed into a long war by our invasion of North Korea...

...Prolifers need to concede that women must have a legal right to choose abortion, while the pro-choicers should admit that there is a moral issue to be faced whenever abortion is considered...

...They plowed their profits into expensive homes, costing as much as $12 million, according to William Seidman, because Texas law forbids taking homes to satisfy a legal judgment...

...The elitist liberals of The Washington Post are really not that different from country club Republicans...

...w e ’ v e all heard those announcements at the beginning of a flight that smoking in the lavatory is forbidden and fooling around with the smoke detector is a federal crime...

...Young was suspended and returned to duty only on the condition, according to Jean Heller of the St...

...It seems that navy doctors are providing free cosmetic surgery to navy personnel and their families...

...A clue is provided by a recent direct mail campaign aimed at the dental profession...

...The latter were so anxious to get their charges aired that they set up shop where the television cameras were stationed-right outside the courthouse...

...If you wantproof of that fact, you need look no further than a recent poll on reducing federal deposit insurance from the current $100,000 per account...

...There is, as we at The Washington Monthly have tried to point out, a sensible and humane middle ground on the abortion issue, which leaders on each side seem afraid to acknowledge...

...I n the days following the Kuwait invasion, administration spokesmen were asked why we didn’t hold prices down by selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve...

...Of course not...

...Okay, that may be a slight overstatement, but I can tell you that in just the past couple of months the local city magazine, The Washingtonian, ran an article on “How to Get Good Stuff Cheap,” and an article entitled “Skinflint Chic” appeared in the monthly magazine that goes to the millions of customers of the Fidelity mutual funds...

...An executive at Ammirati & Puris, which handles BMW and was one of the main exploiters of status anxieties, said recently: “A lot of the baby boomers in the 1980s were insecure consumers who used their buying binges as a way to define their identity...

...Of the options Bush chose, the one that struck me as best was the world trade embargo, which his administration appears to have done an admirable job of organizing...

...But they do keep blacks out of golf clubs, off tennis courts, out of swimming pools, and out of good jobs...

...Neither really thinks blacks are as intelligent or as able as whites...

...Seven junior high school teachers recently were suspended for having beaten two students and, according to Steven Weisman of The New York Times, “burying them up to their necks on a beach as the waves crashed in...

...And if that isn’t enough, we could enact a gasoline rationing program that would not only control but could even collapse the market-because America still is by far the world’s leading oil consumer...

...Among the “outs” in a “What’s Hot, What’s Not” sidebar was Grey Poupon mustard, the advertising for which appealed to the absolute worst in Yuppiedom...

...There are still rednecks in the North as well as the South who will physically threaten blacks as they did most recently in Baltimore...

...I hope the executive is right...

...T erece nt story of the death of a 15-year-old girl near Tokyo indicates that in the Japanese character there remain at least traces of the qualities the rest of the world was finding less than charming a half century ago...

...Instead of concentrating on firsthand inspection of aircraft, FAA inspectors prefer to sit in comfortable offices, perusing records...

...The Office of Government Ethics is not listed in the phone book...

...The country clubbers aren’t violent, and they don’t conspire to put innocent blacks in jail...

...So Young did the right thing and was punished for it...

...The senators not only take the week off but have drifted back into the habit of taking Fridays and Mondays off as well...

...Smoking in airplane lavatories is extremely dangerous...

...It resembles nothing so much as the antebellum Tara in “Gone with the Wind...

...To illustrate the article I wrote in our June issue trying to explain why today’s journalists are definitely not soak-the-rich crusaders, I wish I could have included a photograph that appeared in the August issue of The Washingtonian...

...It is the study of conspiracy theories, and it is highly relevant to race relations in America today...

...From 1986 to 1989, navy doctors nationwide,” revealed the story, “performed more than 1,800 breast augmentations, face lifts, nose jobs, liposuctions, and hair transplants...

...That‘s what ‘00ss’ Tweed demanded when he saw the handwriting on the A few years back, when legislative business was languishing because too many senators had gotten into the habit of taking Mondays and Fridays THEM DAMN off, the leadership struck a deal under which, in return for working I P I c T m ” already guess what has happened...

...Will she be backed up by the spineless FAA...

...Now many no longer need these badges of belonging...

...But I’m usually the wrongest when I’m eager to detect signs that one of my causes is becoming popular...

...But they are the only ones who hate blacks enough to mount a conspiracy, and-this is crucial-they simply are not the same people who control the legal system...

...When Young asked the captain to have airline security personnel meet the plane to investigate, he refused...

...News & World Report, and she of National Public Radio...

...Do you remember when Philip Morris paid Deborah Norville for that speech in Hawaii...

...An angry teacher had crushed her head by slamming it against the gate when she was seconds late entering school...

...Instead, it’s briefcases and torts, yellow pads and field trips to court houses, and the promise of “an invaluable chance to gain a competitive edge in the law school admissions process...

...Something has gone badly wrong between whites and blacks, and, in contrast to most of the history of the two groups, this time it is the blacks who are mostly at fault...

...There is still, of course, the old-mostly Republicancountry club prejudice against blacks...

...Even advertisers are aware of what’s happening...

...But why have they rushed military forces to Saudi Arabia if not, in part at least, to control oil prices...

...What is clear is that physical violence in the form of corporal punishment of pupils is common in the Japanese school system...

...This doesn’t mean there isn’t white prejudice...

...And just as the Southerners needed to be told they were dead wrong, the blacks who fall for the white conspiracy theory need to be told they are dead wrong...

...It was barred not on the basis of fantasy fears but because smoldering cigarettes dropped into the receptacle for discarded paper towels have caused serious fires on airplanes...

...Young confronted the passenger, who admitted his guilt...

...I love the idea of using the thousands of military officers who will not be needed in the postCold War military as teachers in the public schools...

...The one that strikes me as worst is the introduction of U.S...

...The company recently received a handsome return on its investment...

...Fifty-seven percent of the people oppose the step...

...In Washington, this paranoia was exacerbated nightly during the month of July by the local television stations, which devoted countless segments to the charges by such statesmen as Minister Farrakhan, Bishop Stallings, and the Reverend Sharpton that Barry was the victim of a racist conspiracy-and almost no time to a rebuttal of those charges by other leaders...

...I’m delighted to report that my campaign for Cheap Chic seems to be sweeping the country...

...The agency found out about Eastern’s lies only because of tips from whistleblowers among the airline’s employees...

...An NBC special on advertising anchored by Norville devoted just 43 seconds to the targeting of cigarette and alcohol advertising at women and blacks, dismissing the subject with Norville’s remark that “the debate will go on . . . but targeting is here to stay...

...Time magazine ran a major feature in its July 23 issue called “Hunkering Down” and subtitled “After the glitzy O OS, cheaper and careful are back in style...

...Petersburg Times, who uncovered this story, “that she would never again take independent action against a revenue,customer found smoking illegally during a flight...

...Furthermore, when you dial OGE’s old line, no forwarding number is given...

...The answer seems to be nothing at all...

...The result has been that a lot of black people have been getting almost as crazy in their attitudes towards whites as white Southerners used to be in their prejudice against blacks...

...The rednecks, the country club Republicans, and the elitist liberals are the real enemies of black progress, and they will just be convinced they are right if large numbers of blacks continue to think the enemy is a phantom legal conspiracy...

...There appears to have been at least a possibility that he disarmed the smoke detector, because it had not gone off...

...Finally, there is paternalistic condescension-mostly from liberal Democrats-that says blacks must be judged by a more indulgent standard, which is why The Washington Post endorsed the obviously inept and crooked Marion Barry three times...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS Charles Peters If you haven’t despaired about what’s happening with the new generation, I have the news that is sure to shove you over the brink...

...When New York blacks blame not the attackers but the victim-why else do they shout the name of the Central Park jogger?-we should say they are crazy...

...My friend answered yes, “abortion is not a big issue with Bush,” adding “it wasn’t with Reagan [with whom my friend had also worked] either...

...FAA, did you know that it And speaking of the spineless believes what the airline industry tells it about safety...

...Well, what happens when some idiot is caught lighting up...