Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles

You have the thanks of a grateful nation and a return ticket to Iraq

One of the crueler results of Bush's war is this headline from The Washington Times. "Third Division to return to Iraq, unit led assault to free Baghdad eighteen months ago." Imagine how hard this is to take for the soldiers involved and for their mothers and fathers and wives and husbands.

Real men don't wear Prada

My friend Jonathan Rowe, who lives in California, is puzzled that Democrats don't respond to being called "girly-men" by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Have they missed the issue of Vanity Fair with Arnold and Maria on the cover? In the credit box accompanying the photograph, we are told that the governor's "grooming products" are from Dior, his "hair products" by Bumble & Bumble, and his jacket by Prada.

For that matter, would a "real man" refuse to debate unless he gets the questions first? Or would he have had more cosmetic surgery, as one source put it, "than Joan Rivers"?

Have they heard of Google?

If nothing else, the example of Bernard Kerik should remind us that it's a good idea for government agencies, especially those with national security responsibilities, to look into the backgrounds of the people they employ. Unfortunately; there is an enormous backlog of pending investigations. Estimates range from 258,000 by UPI to 350,000 by Stephen Barr of The Washington Post of uncompleted background investigations at the Department of Defense, and from 224,000 (UPI) to 340,000 (Barr) at civilian agencies. On average, it now takes 375 days to complete a full-field investigation. When I was in the government during the Kennedy-Johnson years, it took two months. With investigations now taking more than a year, agencies are confronted with the miserable choice of letting potential employees come aboard without the proper clearance, or of making them wait so long that they become impatient and take another job.

The administration's solution to this problem is to merge the Department of Defense investigators into the Office of Personnel Management. Alas, as we have learned with the Department of Homeland Security, mergers do not guarantee increased efficiency.

The Ostrich Syndrome

My son lives in California, in an exurban hotbed of Bush voters. I asked him why his neighbors, who seemed conservative in most respects, were not at all disturbed by the deficit. His explanation was that they are so in hock in their own lives--with maxed-out credit cards and home equity loans piled on top of mortgages--that the last thing they want to do is contemplate the dangers of excessive debt, whether it is their own or the nation's.

What we meant to say was "Oops!"

You may have seen on the front page of The Washington Post in late November the headline "Virginia wife slain after court denies protection." It told the story of a woman who had been murdered after pleading with a judge to extend a protection order against her estranged husband, who had beaten and threatened to kill her. A few days later, the Post ran two sentences in its correction box on page 2, saying that the original story "may have left the impression that the judge had refused" to grant the extension, and that in fact "additional documents show that the protective order was dismissed at the [wife's] request." Are two sentences on page 2 enough to correct the erroneous main thrust of a front page story?

Tee fees are on us

After it was revealed by ABC's "20/20" in April 2001, among other reports, that federal judges were getting free trips to "conferences" at fancy, resorts where more time was spent on the golf course than on jurisprudence, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) proposed to prohibit such junkets when they were sponsored, as they often are, by corporations interested in currying favor from the bench. Wait a minute, the judges said, give us a chance to police ourselves. So Leahy forbore. The judges assigned the issue to a committee headed by District Judge Willis L. Osteen.

The panel has now reported, we learn from Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington

Post. The only problem is...