TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Peters, Churles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS “C oncluding testimony at hearings on his nomination to be CIA director, Robert M. Gates said yesterday that he gave incorrect testimony four years ago in defense of the...
...Just in case the principle is still It seems that the entire CIA needed a map, or at least that’s what recent revelations suggest...
...As one who has been occasionally guilty of the first of these practices, I’m not indifferent to the efficacy of a bit of shouting now and then...
...And you can safely take that as a cautious estimate...
...Some of this process makes sense...
...by the time this is printed, the cut will probably be restored and the irresistible appeal of the Firemen First Principle will once more have been illustrated...
...But it’s now known that the situation was even worse with the CIA agents recruited in Cuba...
...Only 4 of the 59 campaign donations made to California Assemblyman William H. Murray Jr...
...In 1935,l in 4 Americans lived The nomination of dim bulbs like Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Clarence Thomas manifests genuine contempt for the intellectual quality of the Supreme Court...
...This is why I think we would be wise to fund a program of sabbaticals for the best public school teachers to try to keep them in the classroom as long as possible...
...He’d never seen the subway...
...But give us people like Antonin Scalia and Lewis Powell who have the wit to write opinions that respect the best traditions of legal thought...
...In order to find a Christmas tree for the White House, they decided it was necessary for both of them to travel all the way to Oregon at taxpayer expense...
...When I go to San Francisco [Glenn lives in San Jose], I eat at L‘Etoile or Fleur de Lys, not Doggie Diner...
...When on one evening news show after another last month I saw those state troopers marching on the state house in Annapolis to protest proposed budget cuts that threatened their jobs, I realized that Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer had mastered the Firemen First Principle that we promulgated in these pages years ago...
...They appeared on page 43 of our July/August issue in “America: A Repair Guide...
...A bill is introduced that reeks of responsible regulatory intent...
...Speaking of senatorial cynicism, if you have ever served in a legislature, you’ve probably been exposed to the following gambit...
...I suspect the reason is that many of them are lawyers and are thus not likely to be among the profession’s more zealous critics...
...But the Department of Agriculture, which had 44,000 employees in 1935, has 113,000 today...
...1 was depressed that most of the defenders of Quayle’s legal reform proposals were conservatives like Cal Thomas and William Buckley...
...I never expected to rise to the defense of Dan Quayle, but I was distressed to see how little serious attention the press gave to the most important of his legal reform proposals last August: the recommendation that this country adopt the loser-pays rule now in force in Great Britain, which as a result finds it needs one-third fewer lawyers per capita than we do...
...Dick Cheney accidentally let slip one reason to The Washington Post: “We need a bomber that can strike deep into enemy territory and carry a large payroll-uh, I mean payload...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS “C oncluding testimony at hearings on his nomination to be CIA director, Robert M. Gates said yesterday that he gave incorrect testimony four years ago in defense of the Reagan administration’s secret arms sales to Iran ‘because that’s what the administration was saying and I repeated it.’ ” This was the first paragraph of The Washington Post’s Gates story on October 5. The New York Times story of the same day did not mention Gates’s admission of incorrect testimony until the 22nd paragraph, and even then the Times omitted the crucial further admission that the false testimony was given “because that’s what the administration was saying...
...What are single parents like me supposed to do when we are forced to take a day off without pay...
...Errors are avoided because they are spotted by people who know things the speechwriters don’t...
...came from his district...
...One director, John Glenn, found it necessary on four separate occasions to rent a private limousine to go back and forth to the airport...
...But in the coverage of the reductions going on in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, Maine, Maryland, California, New Jersey, and Washington, I’ve seen no reporting about these matters...
...But in recent years the list of possible protectors has been expanded to include influential members of the press...
...After all, they have more important things to do...
...It ranks with physically dangerous coal mining and assembly line work, air traffic controlling, trial lawyering, and live television directing as the kind of activity that I can’t imagine anyone enduring steadily over a long period of time...
...Webster has to give him directions...
...I’m happy to report that the California legislature caught on to the con and, even though the bill had the backing of the powerful assembly speaker, Willie Brown, rejected it in September...
...Well, if you’re planning to go into the tank, make sure you go to the deepest part and stay there...
...So there is little debate, and it sails through...
...The wife of former FBI and CIA Director William Webster recently told a reporter that she’s now acting as her husband’s “living map...
...In the seventies, liberals failed to question the labor unions’ aggressive pursuit of wage increases without regard to productivity increases, a pursuit that contributed mightily to the decline of American competitiveness...
...Many of the same people who just got fired...
...According to the LAIS Angeles Times, California Highway Patrol records show that on more than 40 occasions during his first six months in office, Covitz ordered officer-driven patrol cars for his own use, including commutes between his home and office...
...He’d never been in a Washington cab,” she explains...
...It’s usually too long for most of the legislators to read but it sounds worthy-and for some mysterious reason it doesn’t even seem to have excited much opposition from the conservatives...
...If the president wants conservatives, okay...
...Mafiosi...
...He didn’t explain how his wife, his son, and a friend of his son’s, who were also in the helicopter, helped him evaluate the traffic situation...
...But 400 workers have retired, taking advantage of the mayor’s pricey early-out plan...
...And guess who the personnel office expects to take their places...
...I did not see a single report that gave the arguments for loser pays...
...The tobacco industry is in fact sponsoring such bills today in state legislatures around the country...
...Often, as when the speech concerns the affairs of other agencies and their officials have to approve it, the figure can be much, much higher...
...The District’s downsizing is going exactly as we feared, with no regard for the quality of the workers...
...They will be ripped off...
...Next to attending meetings and writing memoranda, the biggest waste of time in the federal government is the clearance process, by which officials “sign off’ on speeches, memoranda, and other documents...
...Just look at the numbers: As we go to press, Dixon is expected to approve the abolition of 650 jobs...
...Are the people being fired bad...
...If you thought Scott Shuger was exaggerating when he argued in these pages (see the July/August 1990 issue) that the federal bureaucracy could be cut in half, please ponder the following fact...
...Murderers...
...In fact, loser pays would help the poor by making it possible for them to get lawyers for meritorious suits that do not involve large amounts of money...
...M u c h of the advice that wise old heads of the Senate give to junior members is statesmanlike...
...Consider Carl Covitz, California’s new secretary of business, transportation, and housing...
...Wasn’t there a single Republican horticulturalist in the entire state of Oregon whom they could have trusted to pick out a tree...
...Covitz explained to legislators that it wasn’t the parade he was interested in but how the traffic around it was being handled...
...Well, maybe, but surely then they woudn’t have been fired in the fist place...
...The bottom line is that it’s the same shell game as before, and any improvement in the quality of the government will be purely accidental...
...In a new book on the subject, Barry Farber of Columbia University’s Teachers College reports that one out of two new teachers leaves teaching within five years...
...Well, surely not, or they wouldn’t be being hired back...
...Teaching elementary and secondary school, where the instructor is on the firing line from four to six hours a day, has always struck me as one of the most draining of jobs...
...But it does seem to me that our system of training physicians goes well beyond even remotely justifiable rigor and extends into the realm of the sadistic...
...A good reporter friend like Woodward could be counted on to set the record straight...
...Liberals were either critical, like Linda Wertheimer, or very quiet...
...The rest came from such public interest groups as the tobacco and oil companies, political action committees for lawyers, cable television operators, mortgage bankers, and horse-racing tracks...
...Well, not exactly...
...And one reporter, the usually excellent Doug Jehl of the L m Angeles Times, actually seemed to buy the lawyers’ argument that loser pays would hurt the poor...
...It is a sad fact that in The Washington Monthly’s long struggle against the overlawyering of America, our fellow liberals have seldom been at our side...
...Their job titles included “traffic flow coordinator,” “facilitators,” “troubleshooters,” “stage attendants,” “bus captains,” and “hosthostess,” according to agency memos that went on to describe duties that included “ensuring that head table cards are placed properly...
...In May, the Urban Mass Transportation Administration flew 105 of its employees, one fifth of its entire staff, to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, for what Frank Greve, who broke the story for Knight-Ridder, described as “three days of deluxe lodging, schmoozing with the clients, and a night’s free fun at the theme park...
...If you flirt with principle, you will only arouse hopes that are better left unstirred...
...According to Major Florentino Aspillaga, a 1988 defector, all of them were secretly working for DGI, the Cuban CIA...
...It might be called something like the Comprehensive Tobacco Control Act...
...By 1990, the number had declined to just 1 in 50...
...o n Ma y 25 the Associated Press filed this report from Miramar, Florida: “A convicted rapist who was freed from prison last year in an early-release program broke into his victim’s home . . . and raped her again...
...Over my years in Washington, I’ve learned that Brookings and incrementalism are practically synonymous...
...I n the annals of government travel abuse, there are many credible claimants to the title of champion, but one agency has to rank as an early favorite for the 1991 title...
...This failure of the Times, or to be more precise, of reporter Elaine Sciolino, was especially disturbing to me because I regard Gates’s participation in creating and propounding the administration cover story on the arms-for-hostages deal-namely that the arms were given because of an alleged Soviet threat to Iran -as the single most damaging piece of evidence against his nomination to be head of the CIA...
...Who were the vicious criminals the deputy was watching through his binoculars...
...For example, before the president makes a speech, at least 17 White House officials have to clear the text...
...profession has not been the only case where liberal identification with a group has made liberal criticism of the profession--even of its worst tendencies-much too rare...
...On this occasion, it was The Washington Times that missed the boat, devoting nary a word to the story until page three...
...The White House travel scandal of the year stars not John Sununu but Gary Walters, the chief usher, and Erwin Williams, the superintendent of grounds...
...On June 14, the Los Angeles Times reported that a California rapist-who had been paroled after serving only six years, just half his sentence, for raping a nine-year-old-girl-raped the girl again as soon as he was released...
...A study of 600 medical students at 10 medical schools stated that “nearly all . . . claimed to have experienced some type of mistreatment,” including, according to a report on the study by David Perlman, science editor of the Sun Francisco Chronicle, “being shouted at, being publicly belittled, being assigned demeaning tasks as punishment, being threatened with harm, and being graded unfairly...
...As for the directors’ custom of I t used to be that a public offcial would seek a protector-someone who could keep him from being screwed by jealous rivals or by a supervisor who might be jealous, irrational, or incompetent-from among other senior officials in his agency or from among congressmen or Hill staffers who oversaw his agency...
...According to the files of Stasi, the East German intelligence agency, most of the East Germans recruited by the CIA since the fifties were in fact double agents who were secretly serving Stasi...
...Whenever he calls from hls car phone asking things like “How do I get to the Watergate?’ Mrs...
...You may disagree with me about that, but surely you must agree that, at the very least, previous victims should be notified when a violent criminal is let out ahead of schedule...
...These anecdotes drive me to distraction for two reasons...
...Legislators refused, saying the governor would have to trim his budget...
...From 1989 through July of this year they spent $145,000 in public funds on air fare, hotels, meals, and other expenses incurred while at out-oftown conferences...
...If you weren’t persuaded by Scott Shuger’s article in these pages (see “The Stealth Bomber Story You Haven’t Heard,” Januarypebruary 1991), consider the Air Force’s own report that the B-2 has developed mysterious cracks and failed tests of its stealthiness...
...In the unlikely event that the bureaucrat’s bluff is called, he may feel compelled to actually cut the essential service, meaning that your house might bum down...
...Nowhere in any of this is there any mention of the quality of the workers...
...I’m just trying to keep everything stable while putting away what little I can for my daughters’ college...
...But Covitz is a mere piker compared to the directors of BART, the San Francisco area subway system...
...0 ne of the problems incidental to an official’s dependence on chauffeurs is that when he leaves office, he can’t find his own way around town...
...There is a catch, however...
...The groups liberals are still reluctant to criticize are teachers and civil servants...
...I will not leave my car parked at the airport,” he explained to the San Jose Mercury-News...
...Tipton Kindel, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections, defended his agency’s failure to warn the now 15-year-old girl: “We can’t presume that everyone wants to be notified...
...Take the California deputy sheriff who spent a July night on a stake-out...
...The latter is of course worthy of attention but should hardly dominate the reporters’ interest the way it has...
...Today, poor people find it easy to get a lawyer only when they have been badly injured, usually in auto accidents-because their cases involve such inflatable pain-and-suffering claims that the lawyer knows he will win a big fee at trial or else, if his case is dubious on the merits, get a substantial sum in settlement because the amount claimed is so large...
...It turns idealistic young healers into self-pitiers who take revenge by overcharging the rest of us and by treating the people they train the same way they were treated...
...It ends with the tale of one worker: “Cindy Boyd, a recent widow who works as a paralegal in the office of child support, said the furloughs mean she and her two teenage daughters will be ‘eating a lot more hamburger and a lot less steak...
...It is not clear whether the paper’s motivation was ideological or filial-it is conservative, and one of its editors is Abrams’s brotherinlaw, John Podhoretz...
...Equally great is the need for a large-scale national service program that will bring the brightest young people into teaching, not as a career, which most of them wouldn’t want, but for two to four years...
...The result is in-boxes overflowing with what is in most cases nonessential paperwork that contributes to each official’s self-pitying sense of being overloaded, stretched past human limit in service to the public...
...The threat to reduce the service will usually produce enough public outcry to prompt the budget cutters to reconsider...
...Schaefer had wanted to raise taxes...
...Those fellows can always be counted on to recommend 5 percent when 10 or 15 or even more is possible...
...on a farm...
...Later you discover it was in fact sponsored by the affected industry’s lobby and was designed to preempt serious regulation...
...Incredibly enough, the Times story did not even begin to suggest that the preceding day’s hearings had contained a negative word about Gates until its 13th paragraph...
...They were a couple of kids diving for golf balls in a golf course pond...
...Completely unmentioned is the effect of her work or her furlough on the kids whose child support she’s supposedly overseeing...
...Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon’s job reduction program) that the dismissals be carried out in a way that gets rid of incompetent workers and irrelevant jobs, not people who are talented and whose work is needed...
...As I discovered in the Peace Corps back in the sixties, that’s how long they would enjoy the work and do it well...
...The Times did better on October 8, reporting in a prominent position on its front page, as did the Post, the news that the teflon had finally rubbed off Elliott Abrams, who the day before had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Iran-contra...
...In this sense, liberals have become enablers, encouraging the professions to resist needed reform...
...Are they good...
...Murray gets the lobbyists’ attention by sending out invitations to fundraisers that include a tastefully printed card with just Murray’s name and a list of the four legislative committees on which he serves...
...On occasion, however, a less clearly edifying note is sounded...
...So what was the first cut offered...
...Only $600 of the $3 1,150 he received in contributions came from individuals...
...In other words, the current rule serves the poor only when big bucks are involved, but it does not help them in the large number of cases where the claims are worthy but small...
...0 ne of the exciting developments of the eighties, as many conservatives have noted, was that state governments assumed roles previously played by federal offices...
...not clear to you, here is its textbook formulation: When a bureaucrat is faced with a budget cut, he should immediately announce that the cut will result in the elimination of a service that is either popular-recall how New York Mayor David Dinkins threatened to close the Central Park Zoo-or essential or, preferably, both, as is the case with firemen...
...Another serious professional problem in this country is teacher burnout...
...Usually in such cases the legislature quickly reconsiders its folly...
...Of course everyone would want to know...
...The problem is that corrections officials just don’t want to be bothered...
...Why is Bush so attached to the B-2...
...1 was cheering Bush’s nuclear disarmament speech until the point where he made clear that he still wants to keep the B-2...
...The violent have proved that they are a danger to the safety of their fellow citizens and should serve their full sentences...
...I think Kindel is dead wrong...
...But often, the long list of clearers is testimony to the egos of those involved or to the desire of the document’s originator to curry favor with the people on the list or to get them to share the blame if something goes wrong...
...The employees traveled at government expense because, according to a UMTA spokesman, “all have specific work assignments in Florida...
...sticking the public agency with hefty bills for dinner at such restaurants as New York’s Windows on the World, Glenn, a true man of the people, explained: “Whether I go for BART or go on my own, I always eat at the best restaurants...
...Churles Peters...
...accomplished by loser pays would be the elimination of phony claims and dubious defenses that clog court calendars, prolong trials, and enrich lawyers but do absolutely nothing for the cause of justice...
...The cost was more than $285,000...
...Some claims in this regard may be exaggerated, but certainly this is not so in the case of travel abuse...
...Loosely translated this means that if you sell out on an issue, leave no doubt about your position...
...Thus, liberal Still, the main good Unfortunately, the legal reporters for newspapers and television stations tend to report the dismissal of bureaucrats with inquiries, not into whether any of the bureaucrats was inept or unnecessary, but into the pain of joblessness...
...Of those, 300 are already empty...
...The Brookings Institution now says the defense budget can be cut by more than one third...
...That means 350 people will be fired...
...w t h st ate and local governments all over the country laying off employees, it is crucial (as we tried to point out in James Bennet’s “Bloat People,” September 1991, on D.C...
...So it was when one younger member I know asked a veteran what to do when he was tempted to compromise on an issue...
...Most likely, no one has any idea how good they are or whether they’re really the best people to replace the retirees...
...I own a Cadillac and a Mercedes...
...The secretary also used a Department of Transportation helicopter to view a parade of soldiers after the Gulf war...
...One of the most popular public services, the state police, whose members could immediately be organized into a persuasive lobby for restoring the cuts...
...I don’t think the taxpayers expect me to lower my standards...
...It seems to me that, with the exception of crimes that will clearly never be repeated, parole and other early-release programs should be available only to nonviolent criminals...
...This hazing, of which the overworking of interns and residents is a significant part, is visited by each generation of physicians upon its successor...
...If the poor person has been cheated by a car dealer, under the loser-pays rule he will be able to get a lawyer to prosecute his claim because the lawyer knows his fee will be paid by the dealer’s insurance company and will not have to come out of the small amount of money recovered by the victim...
...Something like this in the end winds up hurting the children...
...A story in the October 2 Washington Post on the proposed furloughs in Prince Georges County is an absolute classic of how reporters emphasize the jobless point to the exclusion of others...
...Why else would a Colin Powell confide so much in a Bob Woodw ard-see Woodward‘s book, The Commanders-if not to buy an insurance policy against the day a Brent Scowcroft or an envious admiral or general tries to derail his career by unfairly distorting the record...
Vol. 23 • November 1991 • No. 11
