I knew Senator Helms. I cannot say Senator Helms was a friend if mine because, as I have explained below, I do not say that anybody is a friend of mine. I was a friend of HIS.

Back in my day, here was a practise in congress called “Giving money BACK.”

National Review worshipped Senator Proxmire, a hard-core leftist, for “giving money BACK.”

Senator Helms also bragged about “giving money back.”

Let me explain this to you.

“Giving money back” meant that a congressman or senator would not spend the funds provided for him by the Senate or the House of Representatives. He would cut his own staff, the people who served his constituency, and spend less than his budget.

The first word is “HOO.”

The second word is “RAY.”

What did “BACK mean?

Each year, Proxmire and Helms and all the others would announce to the retards that they were “giving money back to the taxpayers.”

Their consituents, being retards, cheered wildly.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the money they were “giving back” went back into the congressional budget. That meant that others got to spend it. Senator Kennedy had a complete Office of Technology on Capitol Hill that was financed entirely from the money conservatives announced they “gave back to the taxpayers.”

My boss, John Ashbrook, always said, “There is no way I’m giving money back. Every dime I get is going into fighting for our side. ”

But John was an outsider and apparently his constituents were not retards.

I remember once I brought a giant march to Washington. Thousands of supporters, mountains of publicity. But Helms’s staff simply was too overworked to deal with us. There were no extra staffer because he was “giving money back.”

Kennedy was using the money.

Helms knew that this giving money back was insane. Would even his retard constituents have sung his praises if he had said, “I am not going to use half my Senate VOTES. I am going to GIVE THEM BACK.”

If he had said that, he would have been put on disability.

But the voters thought that “giving money back” was really Shrewd.

And it WAS the epitome of being Dumb.

National Review thought it was great.

I am going to hear Joe’s, “God you’re BORING me!” Nobody comments on my inside-the-beltway discussion and it is probably too far from the latest news from Syria to interest anybody, but if you choose to listen to a senlie old man, ramble, you have to expect this.

I have never understand why somebody who can read without moving his lips denounces a thousand words of boredom. It takes a reasonably literate person about thirty seconds to skim over a thousand words and decide it is drivel. The time required to READ it all and THEN write that it is boring runs into an acual waste of attention.

And when Joe says I am boring he never suggests what he WANTS to read from me. That is just plain bad manners.

If we are actually planning on taking POWER it might be useful to hear from somebody what power is LIKE. If Reagan had listened to me he might have actually had more of a revolution.

Let me repeat, the Reagan Revolution wsno revolution, as people keep pointing out. But Reagan did things that were so fundamentally important that they are forgotten as a part of history.

As the media keep explainng, the Soviet Union HAPPENED to collapse during the eight years of the Reagan presidency. This blog and my book discussed how the BBC, PBS and the entire Politically Correct establishment keeps trying to explain that every large species in America, from the mammoth to the Giant Sloth, just HAPPENED to drop dead at the same time Nature-Loving Native Americans came across the land bridge from Asia.

You see, Native American lived WITH Nature, not AGAINST Nature as we Evil Whites do. So it is a bit embarrassing that, after a million years and several Ice Ages, all those large animals suddenly died out just as the Native Americans got here. Hence the endless rationalizations about how they just just dropped dead in that particular Ice Age.

Lord, it is tiresome explaining this over and over!

OK. Back to the tiresome explanation AGAIN. All the media and fanatics in our movement keep explaining that Reagan had nothing to do with the collapes of the Soviet Union.

Then there are those who whisper to us that Reagan did get rid of the Soviet Empire, but that was all a ruse Reagan and Soviets were in on.

Arranged by the Jews or the Bilderbergers.

Come on, gang! I am willing to repeat the obvious over and over and over and over, ad nauseum, but there are some scenarios where I just have to say this sounds to me like the guy who says, “I am tired of people whispering behind my back that I’m PARANOID!”

Give me a friggin’ BREAK!

When Reagan went into office, there was a saying, “20-20.” It meant that the interest rate ws approaching 20% and the UNEMPLOYMENT rate was approaching 20%.

Reagan ads in 1980 showed shrieking sirens in California when Reagan took office. They said Reagan had dealt with an unprecedented disaster in California when he became governor and he could deal with the Crisis of 1980.

By 1982, all the media, and therefore everybody else, had forgotten that there WAS a Crisis of 1982.

And our fanatics are, as always, firm allies of the media. They forget that we dealt with any crisis in 1980.

For some reason, I find that offensive. Maybe it is because, in 1981, I was nearing my first nervous breakdown by working a hundred hours a week to solve that nonexistent crisis.

Sorry to bore you, Joe.

In case you think what I said below is something new that Reagan couldn’t know about, I refer you to the BBC programs, “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister.” The latter is MUCH better thant he former, and I would start with that. It is also hilarious.

It has always been known that the Civil Service rules Britain by a very simple tactic. When a new Government is elected, the Prime Minister is only allowed to appoint the HEADS of departments. So the titular head of a department is single person, a member of parliament, who fills the office at the very top of hte departmental pyramid. Even his personal aide is a member of the permanent civil service, whom the Civil Service appoints.

Unless you have tendency to stare vacantly and drool, you know what the result is. Within a month, the so-called head of the department is an absolute robot in the hands of Britain’s real government, the Civil Service.

That happens to be the exact reason that America’s Civil Service system had to keep compromising with congressmen who had been there a long time and allow the president to appoint, not only cabinet members as department heads, but a thousand others. That was why I and others like me were up thereinthe office next to the head of hte civil service. In Britain it would have been a Permanent Civil Servant.

When a department head in Britain decides to do something silly, his aides decide whether they want to encourage him or not. There are no Wet Blankets like Ole Bob sitting right there in the next office.

If the permanent civil service can’t have one of their own sitting there, the next best thing is to have a group of total amateurs around the boss. Reagan gave them that.

As I say, the proof of the pudding is that this rank amateur managed to be almost unique in trying something so dumb that he failed Senate confirmation for exactly the same job in the second Reagan Administration.

Where was I? I had taken a career job as writer for the Voice of America. His only professional had left.

In fact, he had said earlier that if he had known my background as a government pro, he would never have taken me on in the first place. He would have made Reagan withdraw the nomination because I was one of the Evil Alligators.

He lost his Alligator and he lost his job.

Shrewd, man, Shrewd!

Since I am no longer, except in legal terms, a public figure, I want to give you some basic lessons in common sense applied to government.

Reagan had a lot of top-level appointmentees at the P.A.S. (See below) level. He took on a lot of the old Republican gang who had “experience” at the high level, i.e., mostly those who would sabotage his programs, because of their “experience.”

But Reagan had a Shrewd saying about the other thousand appointees BELOW P.A.S. level:

“We are here to clean out the swamp, not to join the alligators.”

For those who have forgotten, I use the capitalized word Shrewd to described the peak level of Dumb. It is mindless tupidity whichisnot just mentioned, but thundered out as Words of Wisdom. The Greatest Generation destroyed our world by beating its chest and screaming out Shrews statements that amounted to pure cowardice:

“I learned in the Service that anybodywho tries to take on the System is just being ridiculous.”

And ad nauseum.

So Reagan said he was going to clear out the entire Washington buraucracy without hiring one single professional.

What this Wise-sounding saying, “We are here to clean out the swamp, not join the alligators” meant, in practice, was that he was not going to leave the cadre in the civil service that every single president has left behind him since the Civil Service was created. He wanted NOBODY among his appointees who would stay on in the civil service after he left office.

Bush was a fool, but he had real experience in real Washington politics. Bush, who was elected as Reagan’s successor, got rid of EVERY SINGLE one of Reagan’s thousand appointees. Bush appointees bragged about which one of them was quickest in getting rid of ALL Reagan appointees.

This was a dirty trick, but normally it would not be a major blow.

You see, EVERY administration normally left a cadre of CAREER employees behind them they had left behind in four, God knows in eight, years in office. That means that if Republicans lost an election, they would still have a cadre of thousands of people INSIDE the Permanent Government they could call to find out what was going on.

Reagan made it his busiess to leave NONE. So when Bush cleaned out his presidential appointees, conservatives did not have a SINGLE source of information INSIDE the government.

That’s what I mean by Shrewd. After 1989, Bus hmoderates and the Democrats had the whole government to themselves.

Now do you understand why, “We’re here to clean out the swamp, not join the alligators” was one of the prime examples of Shrewd?

I will say this for James Watt, one of Reagan’s few P.A.S. hard-core conservatives. He defied Reagan and announced openly that if any Reagan conservative waned a PERMANENT civil service job in his Interior Department, he would find one for them. So I overstated the case, there was a Reagan legacy there.

Reagan appointed my boss as head ofhte civil service. Bless his heart, what a hopeless amateur he was! When I first got there, he got his head yes-man to “show me the ropes.” When we sat down, he immediately pulled out the reorganization plan they had put in place.

I thought, “My Lord (thought the exact was not Lord), they fell for the old Reorganization crap!”

Let me explain. When a potentially radical administration like that of Reagan is elected, the bureaucracy wants to defang when it is in its first flush of revolution. When they first get there, the new administration appointees want to DO something. So when every new president comes in, professional bureaucrats do the same thing. They present the new guy with a Reorganization Plan. He gets to DO SOMETHING.

He gets to do something HARMLESS. He shuffles around the different departments. That is standard. That is something no professional would fall for. ALL the Reagan appointees did that instead of doing anything important.

So while this yes man gleefully described how they had rearranged he chairs onthe deck of hte Titanic, I sat there thinking that I could not possibly be talking to a grown man, much less the number 2 man in charge of the entire United States civil service under Reagan.

To give them their due, I am sure BUSH appointees laughed in their faces when they present this old Reorganization crap.