Tilting at Windmills - news and observations on current political and social issues

Washington Monthly, May, 2000 by Charles Peters

The Cat Who Kept Me Cool * The Magic of 527 * Stickin * It To The Dick Morrises The Criminal Who Wouldn't Quit * The Judge Who Wouldn't Wait * Mrs. Astor and Second Hand Rose

"STRONG ECONOMY COULD Make His Fight Difficult, Bush Says" ran the headline in a late March edition of The Washington Times. Cynical Republicans must be tempted to sabotage the economy, just as Democrats suspect they sabotaged negotiations to free the Iranian hostages until after Ronald Reagan won a victory that was in considerable part influenced by voter dismay over Carter's handling of the hostage crisis. In that case Democratic suspicions have never been confirmed. But in one case they were. That was in the 1968 election in which Richard Nixon's narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey was helped by Republican sabotage of the Paris peace talks. Humphrey was overtaking Nixon in the polls the week before the election, helped by the fact that the Johnson administration seemed close to negotiating a Vietnam agreement. But a Republican operative Anna Chennault persuaded the South Vietnamese to throw a monkey wrench into the settlement the weekend before the election. Could Alan Greenspan be the Anna Chennault of 2000?

THERE WAS A STORY IN ONE of the local papers last week about a suburban couple who had searched for their lost cat for six months before finally finding it. As a former cat owner I understood why they kept looking. Our first cat, Martha, loved to escape the confines of our backyard and roam the neighborhood. I always followed, searching behind shrubs and bushes, calling her name, which was usually futile because, outside our home, she took delight in pretending she had never seen me before. It is hard to understand why we were so devoted to Martha. She bit. But, since she was our first cat, we assumed all cats bit and that was just part of the bargain. Martha did have one endearing quality. Whenever domestic discord would cause me to raise my voice--my wife says I yelled--Martha would leap on to my lap, put her paws on my chest, and yowl. The absurdity of the scene made it impossible to maintain the seriously self-righteous attitude I usually bring to family altercations. My wife and I would start laughing. Having done her duty, Martha would jump down and cast an eye to see if the back door was ajar enough to permit another jaunt through the neighborhood.

BY A 5-4 MARGIN THE SUPREME Court ruled that the Food and Drug Administration can't regulate tobacco. It seems to me that the FDA had a good case. The 1938 law establishing the agency gave it the power to regulate any article other than food "intended to affect the structure or any function of the body." How can anyone doubt that nicotine affects bodily function?

This is a scary decision coming in the wake of last year's D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that held that Congress could not delegate the power to issue regulations to the Environmental Protection Agency. These decisions hark back to the days when conservative Supreme Court justices were striking down FDR's attempt to regulate the cruelties and excesses of unfettered capitalism. Liberals, moderates--all reasonable men and women--should hear alarm bells ringing.

"ONE OFFICER IS CAUGHT soliciting Hollywood hookers, an officer tears up a traffic citation for sexual favors, and a sergeant repeatedly rapes a cadet." All of this happens in a new book, The Rose Garden, by a Pasadena, California police officer, Nauru L. Ware. The book also describes a lieutenant who "deletes records of a 911 domestic violence call from the home of a former chief" According to Richard Winton of the Los Angeles Times to whom I'm indebted for this account, "many incidents in the book are derived from events documented in court cases, police reports and newspaper stories over the last decade." So how has the Pasadena police department responded to the book? It has suspended the author. His colleagues are being offered counseling. The good guy gets punished while the bad guys get counseled.

SOMETHING ELSE TO BE ALARMED about is a looming shortage of public employees. 14,000 of New York City's 78,000 public school teachers will retire in the next 18 months, according to The New York Times. And according to Governing magazine, 42 percent of state and local government employees will be eligible to retire in the next 15 years. I'm sure you're tired of my complaints about the federal government's failure to recruit, but now we see that the problem extends to the state and local level as well. "Teachers, cops, civil engineers, accountants, mid-level managers, nurses and budget analysts are going to be retiring in droves," reports Governing. "At the same time, the pool of potential job candidates is going to be shrinking. The number of workers 25-44 years old--prime recruitment fodder for governments--is expected to drop by 3 million between 1998 and 2008."

IF YOU HAVE SUSPECTED THAT universities have too much fat in their administrative structure, you will be interested to know that Marshall University has 15 vice presidents. That's right, 15. There's even one for "executive affairs" not to mention the one for "multicultural and international affairs."