From Shelby Steele, writing on American TalibanJohn Walker on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal (December 10,2001):
Walker came out of a self-hating stream of Americanlife. Yes, alone in Yemen and later in Pakistan, he may have been seduced bycharismatic people. But he was prepared for this seduction not just by the wispyrelativism of Marin County, but also by a much broader post-'60s culturalliberalism (more than political liberalism) that gave his every step towardtreason a feel of authenticity and authority.
From Tammany boss George Washington Plunkitt, as recorded by reporterWilliam L. Riordan in his 1905 classic Plunkitt of Tammany Hall,discoursing on "The Curse of Civil Service Reform" (which, of course, made itdifficult for Tammany to put its supporters on the city payroll):
Say, let me tell of one case. After the battle of SanJuan Hill [in the Spanish-American War], the Americans found a dead man with alight complexion, red hair and blue eyes. They could see he wasn't a Spaniard,although he had on a Spanish uniform. Several officers looked him over, and thena private of the Seventy-First Regiment saw him and yelled, "Good Lord, that'sFlaherty." That man grew up in my district, and he was once the most patrioticAmerican boy on the West Side. He couldn't see a flag without yellin' himselfhoarse.Now, how did he come to be lying dead with a Spanish uniform on?...[I]n themunicipal campaign of 1897, that young man, chockful of patriotism, worked dayand night for the Tammany ticket. Tammany won, and the young man determined todevote his life to the service of the city. He picked out a place that would suithim, and sent in his application to the head of the department. He got a replythat he must take a civil service examination to get the place. He didn't knowwhat these examinations were, so he went, all lighthearted, to the Civil ServiceBoard. He read the questions about the mummies, the bird on the iron, and all theother fool questions--and he left the office an enemy of the country that he hadloved so well. The mummies and the bird blasted his patriotism. He went to Cuba,enlisted in the Spanish army at the breakin' out of the war, and died fightin'his country.
That is but one victim of the infamous civil service... Ah, how many young menhave had their patriotism blasted in the same way!
Bless You, Little Redundancy
Say you're the head of a New Democrat think tank and a report you'vecommissioned on how to downsize the U.S. Postal Service, in best third-wayfashion, has just been plopped upon your desk. Right up top in the introduction,the study forthrightly acknowledges that the proposed reforms "may well mean thatthe USPS will cut its workforce substantially." And then the anthrax startshitting, and postal workers take sick and die, and talk of downsizing thedepartment sounds heartless to even the tinniest New Democrat ear.
Such was the challenge faced this month by Will Marshall, president of theProgressive Policy Institute (PPI), whose December 6 cover letter accompanyingthe PPI's report is a masterpiece of first-paragraph delicacy (its compositionclearly demanded of the affable Marshall the most intense tonal concentration)."The men and women of the United States Postal Service have suffered greatly inthe wake of the terrorist attacks," Marshall begins. (This is way high up tolet on that we'll be adding to their suffering, too, right? We're stilljust sitting down and saying hello.) "While mourning the loss of colleagues, theyhave also experienced financial losses as mail volumes dropped, in part due tofear of anthrax and in part due to the deepening of the recession." (Is it toosoon to bring up economics, even in this sympathetic vein? You think? Back tostraight sympathy?) "Our hearts go out to them in this time of loss, and ourthoughts are with them as they work to make the mail secure again." (Thisthing is being delivered by courier, right? Now--is that enough with thesympathy? Can we get to the point? Can we write like third-waysters already?Awright!)
"We must remember, however, that the problems faced by the USPS are not onlythe result of terrorist acts....USPS has shown little ability to innovate, andcompounding the problem suffers from severe labor relations problems." (Nowwe're talkin'.)
If At First You Don't Succeed...
Last October, while the World Trade Center ruins still smoldered, HouseRepublicans decided that the best way to help the economy along was with agigantic corporate and upper-bracket tax cut thinly disguised as a "stimulus"package. At the time, all they managed to stimulate was a healthy and widespreaddisgust. But Senate majority leader Tom Daschle has put the kibosh on the Houseplan, refusing to use it even as a point of negotiation. For weeks, the talkshave been stalled, with Daschle correctly concluding that no stimulus plan wasbetter than the one the House had passed.
But in mid-December, the House Republicans, again with White House approval,put out a "new" stimulus plan. Guess what? It looks a lot like the old one. Theold plan handed out about $212 billion, most of it to large businesses that paylittle in income tax; the new one hands out $202 billion. The old bill completelyrepealed the "alterative minimum tax" (ATM) and actually refunded about 15years' worth of ATM revenues; the new one repeals about two-thirds of the tax andhands out the rebates more gradually. Both bills vastly increase depreciationwrite-offs for corporations to the tune of about $109 billion over three years.One manifestation of an obsession is to keep doing the same thing after it's beenshown not to work. Would somebody please put this party on the right medication?
GOP Charitable Giving
Where, oh where, are our tax dollars going if the key provisions of theHouse economic-stimulus package make it into the final legislation? (Assumingthere ever is final legislation.) The list of corporations up formega-handouts--should they get rebates for the "alternative minimum taxes"they've paid over the past 15 years--is a platinum collection of America's LeastNeedy. There's no question, though, as to the identity of the biggest sinkholeinto which these public dollars could be sunk: Enron.
Yes, Houston's leading corporate citizen was up for a cool$254 million under the terms of the GOP's first stimulus plan, and stands tocollect most of that in the newly revised version. As is not the case with othercorporations, moreover, we have a pretty clear sense of how Enron is apportioningits income these days. Right before it filed for bankruptcy, the company handedout more than $55 million in bonuses to nearly 500 of its top executives. Rightthereafter, it laid off 4,000 of its less august employees. (Also, in possibleviolation of federal law, it had prohibited most of its 21,000 employees fromselling the Enron shares in their 401(k) portfolios. Many Enron workers thusapproach retirement with little to nothing in savings--but reside, at least, in awarm-weather climate.)
All in all, the GOP has found the perfect beneficiary for its largesse: aninstitution where wealth is distributed not even top-down but top-sideways.
