Gauleiters and Commissars

Reading Bob Woodward's fascinating account of how Mark Felt became Deep Throat, I was struck by a passage where Woodward was discussing the Nixon political operatives being dispatched to staunch the bleeding.

Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." The word "gauleiter" is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control."

There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis. During this period, he had to stop efforts by others in the bureau to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in the Los Angeles area, for example, or to open a file on every member of Students for a Democratic Society.

Every President tries to put his people in key places, but this concentration of power in the hands of political commissars that was slowed by Nixon's fall has reached new extremes in the Bush administration. Because politics always comes first for the Commissar, getting the job done comes last. Thus the blunders of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bremer in Iraq, the 911 fiasco, and other outrages of the clown show.

The civil service system was intended to end the abuses of the spoils system, but the proliferation of political appointees - now 3000 or so, has circumvented that and facilitated the growth of the Commissariat. I would love to see Democrats, or anybody else, running on a program of reforming government corruption. Only two rules would be needed.

1)Congress would be made subject to the same ethical laws as the civil service, and

2)The number of political appointees would be limited to, say, 40.