THE BELL CURVE:Rumsfeld film is true

For six years, I punished myself by watching Donald Rumsfeld’s news conferences. It wasn’t just the bunk he was handing out, the everything’s-rosy-in-Baghdad line that anyone who watched or read the daily news knew was false.

That was painful enough. But what hurt me the most was the performance of the journalists who let him get away with it. My associates. The people at the highest level of the line of work I’ve embraced for a lifetime.

They took careful notes of the innuendo, evasion and wisecracks Rumsfeld delivered and never laid a glove on him. And I suffered and came back to watch the next Rumsfeld performance in the vain hope that one of the bevy of journalists covering him would pin him to the wall. It never happened — at least not while I was watching.

I bring this up now because last week I saw Rumsfeld laid bare in a film called, “No End In Sight,” which is playing around Newport-Mesa and should be required watching for every American who would like to get a straight look at the horrendous decisions that got us into the morass of Iraq and the civil war we engendered in the process.

Throughout this narrative, we see Rumsfeld news conferences played off against the backdrop of what was really taking place in Iraq while he shared wisecracks with the reporters covering him. The contrast is merciless in exposing his hypocrisy.

Michael Moore has done this sort of thing and done it well. But his increasing penchant for personal involvement on screen has made it easy for critics to concentrate on the persona of Moore rather than the information he’s imparting. That isn’t true of “No End in Sight.” This is high-level reporting, offered without personal garnish, which may make it less entertaining but also allows it to pack a more powerful wallop. Just the opposite of Donald Rumsfeld.

Finally.

I got a letter the other day from John Dean who retired a few years ago as Orange County superintendent of schools, but is still keeping a close eye on education in these parts. From that place, he was saddened by what seemed to him an inadequate tribute to Bill Ritter, who died several weeks ago after a lifetime of dedicated service to public education in Newport-Mesa.

Although I didn’t know him, he was the principal at Horace Ensign School when my youngest daughter attended there and Ritter was working his way up through the ranks of the school system. Dean remembers Ritter played varsity basketball at Newport Harbor High School and was a bomber pilot in the European theater in World War II, “but he never talked about it.”

Wrote John Dean: “Bill was a good guy, one of the best. He requested no service, so the multitudes of his friends and former students had no opportunity to celebrate his life. Bill gave 32 years of his professional life to the children and schools in the harbor area, and I hate to see him just disappear from the face of the earth with no more recognition than a brief obit.”

Some years ago when my byline was visible in national magazines, I was invited to deliver lectures to cruise passengers on various aspects of writing in return for free passage. One unwritten and unspoken rule that went along with this venue was our support of other lecturers with the same arrangement. Sometimes, fellow lecturers were the only people in our audience.

I bring this up here because I sense the same understanding about fellow columnists, which is sometimes rather difficult. This brings us to Jim Righeimer’s column of last week in which he explained us Democrats to ourselves.

I would thank him and go on with my bad thinking with one exception — a quote he included in his article I think illustrates quite well a basic difference between our two major parties. In making the point that California is “losing some of our most productive citizens” because of our high tax rates, he quoted, apparently with approval, one such deserter as saying:

“When we were raising our son, I just paid my taxes and did not complain. I no longer feel I am getting anything out of sending that six-figure check each year.”

It would occur to a Democrat what he is getting out of it is the satisfaction of knowing he is helping to pick up the tab for educating other kids, just as a lot of his neighbors and fellow citizens without children in school helped pick up the tab for educating his kids. Instead, what he is saying here is: “I got mine. Now I’m getting out.” It may be wild fantasy on my part, but I feel such thinking is far less compatible with us card-carrying, soft-in-the-head Democrats.