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Tilting at Windmills - observations on various political issues

Washington Monthly, June, 2001 by Charles Peters

Monolingualism at the CIA * The Hazards of E-mail * Rove's Jag Spy Planes Off Catalina * Changing the Guard

THE GOOD NEWS ON THE CELL phone front: I rode on two Amtrak Metroliners last month and each had a quiet car in which cell phones were banned. The bad news is a doctor in Hong Kong recently had a nice chat on his cell phone about buying a BMW while operating on a patient's colon. The next day, according to the Boston Globe's Hong Kong correspondent, the patient was rushed back to the hospital with a punctured colon. The Hong Kong Medical Society, acting in the great tradition of physician licensing boards, declined to discipline the doctor involved. It did say that it "does not accept the use of mobile telephones during an operation or procedure without due justification." The inescapable conclusion is that the medical society deems getting a good deal on a BMW a "due justification." How can a misplaced slice here and there on a patient compare with shaving a thousand or two off the price of a car?

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MUCH OF THE PRODUCTIVITY gain of recent years has been attributed to the computer, but we can't help suspecting that the gain will disappear if the use of e-mail continues to increase. A recent Gartner survey showed 56 percent of respondents saying they had used e-mail more at work this year than last. The average increase in usage is 38 percent. "It's getting worse," Gartner research director Neil McDonald tells Tim Lemke of The Washington Times, "and it's going to continue to get worse." A lot of employees who seem to be working diligently at their computer stations are actually chatting with friends or reading and forwarding jokes and chain letters. And we haven't even mentioned computer games, with which more than a few employees become obsessed. Will fun and games doom the computer revolution?

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE Senate Democrats made a whopper of a mistake when they agreed early on to a $1.2 trillion tax cut instead of the $1.6 trillion that Bush wanted. They set the floor too high. They knew the House would give him $1.6 trillion and they would have to go to a conference committee. They would have to compromise, as indeed they did, ending up around $1.35 trillion which they know is too high a figure to leave enough money after the cuts to pay for even the education programs we need, much less deal effectively with all the other problems this country faces.

I DELIGHT IN FINDING ARTICLES that have somehow gotten past the conservative editors of The Washington Times even though the stories suggest that Bill Clinton did something right or George Bush did something wrong. (For those of you who live outside the Times' circulation area, I offer the following four-column headline from its front page to suggest its unique approach to objective journalism: "Charming Bush Lauded After 100 Days.") So you can imagine how pleased I am by a recent piece in the Times suggesting both that Clinton was right to institute his COPS program to put 100,000 new community-oriented police on the streets and that Bush is wrong to propose cutting it. Here's a quote to give you the flavor: "Law enforcement officials said COPS had been a boon for area departments, with grants from the program used to hire or redeploy more than 5,400 police officers in Maryland, Virginia, and the District." A specific example of what the program means comes from Alexandria, where 14 new officers were added and the crime rate dropped more than 30 percent.

IN CASE YOU'VE BEEN PERSUADED by recent reports suggesting that Florida voters really intended to elect Bush, consider this just in from the Palm Beach Pose 5,330 ballots were thrown out because they were punched for both Gore and Buchanan, but only 1,131 because they were for Bush and Buchanan.

As A GENERAL RULE OF WHITE House history, it can be said that the most sought-after office space in the building has been on the first floor, because that's where the president is. But arguably the two most powerful members of the Bush team, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, have chosen offices on the second floor. You'll also notice that in White House meetings, Rove is rarely shown at front and center, but usually out of the way, a little off to the side. I like both his choice of offices and where he sits in meetings. The only disquieting news is that he's traded in what he described as the beat-up heap he drove in Texas for a metallic-blue Jaguar. That's not the custom with the wilier Washingtonians I've known. They didn't drive cars that drew attention to themselves. Even when the car was expensive, the color was subdued.

ONE OF THE CONTINUING scandals of the federal government over the lifetime of this magazine has been the failure of its agencies to hire or train their employees for linguistic competence. Time after time, we learn of an embassy or CIA station with only a handful--and sometimes less than that--of local-language speakers. Today, according to The New York Times, "roughly half of the State Department's postings are filled by people lacking the necessary language skills." And now we find that that poor missionary's wife and baby were slaughtered because the CIA contractor employee in the spotter plane couldn't speak Spanish well enough to communicate with the Peruvian who, thinking the missionary's plane was running drugs, ordered it shot down. And this was not an isolated case. A former CIA pilot told The Washington Post, "This is one of the fallacies of the whole program: the language barrier." Ironically, one of the arguments long used to justify agencies contracting out government functions is that the government can obtain special competencies not possessed by its regular staff. So if the United States was going to hire a private contractor to perform the sensitive function of helping Peruvians determine what planes to shoot down, wouldn't it have made sense to insist that the contractor's employees speak the language of the Peruvians?

Tilting at Windmills - observations on various political issues

Washington Monthly, June, 2001 by Charles Peters

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