A piece of inside-the-beltway jargon in DC is “P.A.S.” This stands for “presidential appointment with Senate approval.” P.A.S. refers to the highest level of presidential appointments, like members of the Cabinet or the Supreme Court, who require not only appointment by the president, but Senate confirmation of thier appointments.

Fox News once referred to me as “a former member of the Reagan cabinet.” I got a laugh out of that one. If Reagan had tried to put in front of a Senate committee as an appointee he would probably have been impeached. Even my background after cleaning my file woud has disqualified me, literally, by the time I graduated from college. According to my FBI file they had to delay integrating my university six months until I left.

Worse, every staffer on the Senate Committee would know who I was. I was not loved on Capitol Hill.

So I was one of the thousand or so Reagan appointees who did not require Senate approval. But I was advisor to one who did.

When Reagan won reelection, many of his P.A.S. posts had to be redone. That is, they had to be appointed again for the new administration and reconfirmed. Normally this is routine.

Please, please, please don’t write me about NEW presidential appointments who were not approved by the Snate. Please do not write me about presidential appointments TO NEW POSITIONS who failed in the Senate. I am talking about people, after the re-election, ARE BEING RECONFIRMED IN THE SAME POSITIONS.

With one exception, I do not know of any case where anyone failed to get Senate confirmation for the reelected administration who had served in a P.A.S. in the old one. It is NOT routine in the sense that many, many of the reappointed P.A.S’s face major campaigns against this, but that is just to raise money and publicity.

The campaigns against reappointments of anyone wh showed cajones inthe former administration are routine, too. They just never work.

I did say I knew of only one exception to invariable reappointment of P.A.S.’s My boss considered me a real pain, so I left before HE faced the Senate again. My boss liked fun. He liked pulling cute tricks. Every time he proposed a new cute trick I was the wet blanket.

So at 8 pm as I worked away in my office directly across from his, I could hear him and his favored yes men talking and laughing. Ole Bob was, as always, out of the clique.

This was not the first time that happened to me in my long career, and it is not the last. I recently did a blog piece explaining why it was in fact very wise of the major pro-white clique to keep me OUT. I can be loyal to a leader, but not to a clique.

John Ashbrook went for my loyalty like a lion after raw meat precisely becuae he was a loner, too. People on Capitol Hill didn’t like him OR me. I have never felt really comfortable in any office but one of John’s, but I was always too useful to get rid of.

In Intelligence, I always got the impression that somebody said, “We have an assignment to a smelly rathole in the third world that no sane person weould take because he won’t come back alive.”

In my imagination someone said, “Well, there’s always Whitaker.”

I also had the paranoid impression that they were disappointed when I DID come back alive.

But that’s probably just my depression acting up.

By now I think you KNOW the only P.A.S. I have ever heard of who got presidential reappointment and LOST Senate approval. My boss tried a trick so juvenile that the Senate, which was controlled by REPUBLICANS, refused to reconfirm him.

You see, his official wet blanket had finally been driven out, and his yes men thought he was really being Shrewd.