Commenting on my piece saying the people I knew on Capitol Hill were like me, working their butts off, Antonio Fini writes:
“Bob there is nothing I love more than stories of bribes, payoffs, scandles, conspiracies and other dirt.”
“Stories about people grinding their pencils down to a stub at 2AM leave me a bit cold. I get eyestrain just thinking about it.”
“But tell me, how does some one work so hard and still fail to transform the world? Did the enemy work harder, or was the timing simply off?”
Antonio old buddy, as to my changing the world, you might want to ask the rulers of the Soviet Union whether I helped to change THEIR world.
Oops, you can’t. They’re not THERE any more.
Well then, you can ask private schools about how they like to be celebrating the third decade of having racial quotas imposed on them by the IRS.
Oops, you can’t, can you? I stopped that from happening.
How about asking whether there should be a Hubble Telescope?
My gosh, there IS one, isn’t there? I stopped them from defunding it.
And that’s the tip of iceberg of what I did sharpening pencils at 2 am and running around the world.
Antonio asks why I did not accomplish more. The answer is simple:
Most of the people who should have been helping me were salivating over the latest scandal and talking about how the people like me who were working and fighting were such bores.
#1 by Mark on 12/02/2005 - 4:51 pm
Hey Bob, is it possible to have some secret scientist clone you and then send that Bob Whitaker back to Washington so he can fix the problems you didn’t have time to get to?
#2 by Antonio Fini on 12/02/2005 - 5:27 pm
Yes Bob. I guess I should have anticipated that answer before posting. But it was late and I was frazzled from the day’s hard work.
A man can only accomplish what’s possible in his own temporal provenance. The Tide of History, and all that.
But I still wish you would share more insider dirt with us.
#3 by Bruce on 12/02/2005 - 7:20 pm
“Well then, you can ask private schools about how they like to be celebrating the third decade of having racial quotas imposed on them by the IRS.
Oops, you can’t, can you? I stopped that from happening.”
In case nobody has thanked you before for that, thanks Bob. That would’ve devastated education.
#4 by Elizabeth on 12/04/2005 - 4:08 pm
I have spent time myself in Washington, but not on the Hill.
I can add this: it ain’t just the paycheck. If the paycheck
is the most important thing for you, do something else. Living
in the D.C. area can be pretty stressful on its own, not to
mention the grief you can get on the job, so you’ll need
some internal motivation. If and when the internal motivation
goes, you’ll need to find something else to do with your life.