Polk County Enterprise (Livingston, Tex.), Vol. 98, No. 51, Ed. 1 Thursday, June 25, 1981 Page: 4 of 32
This newspaper is part of the collection entitled: Polk County Newspapers and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the Livingston Municipal Library.
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cy and awesome destructive power
leave the Reagan administration no
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! as much of it as possible mobile.
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launched cruise missiles being built by Boeing
fHll soon provide Air Force bombers with a
strategic weapon capable of striking Soviet
unch points outside the Soviet
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Union’s borders.
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And recently, the Reagan administration
directed the Navy to proceed with its own long-
range cruise missile program to mount nuclear-
tipped Tomahawk missiles on surface ships and
submarines. The tomahawks will be built by the
Convair Division of the General Dynamics Corp.,
in San Diego, Calif.
The administration’s decision makes obvious
sense as part of a defense strategy designed to
reduce tne military incentive, and thus the
likelihood, of a Soviet first strike.
Significantly, the decision also reflects the
Reagan administration’s inclination to tailin' its
defense programs to actual security needs rather
than to the largely illusory promise of arms con-
trol agreements.
IIIUWIW WIUKIISU UMU auuiiuu H1CH U1 BUI MUX
ships. The prohibition expires early next year
and, predictably, the Soviets want it extended.
But doing so would only leave the United States
less able to deter a Soviet nuclear attack.
Then too, someone should remind the Soviets
that they had agreed to forego production and
deployment of the SS-18s and other first-strike
weapons, a long-range Tomahawk for the Navy
might not have been necessary.
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What happens to national security while half the
Navy’s young enlisted personnel are blowing their
minds with marijuana and hashish?
This is tiie sobering question posed by the
disclosure that a random check of 1,060 sailors
and airmen in San Diego, Calif., and 1,017 in Nor-
folk, Va., last December found more than 48 per-
cent of them were using drugs. The numbers are
not exactly new: tile Defense Department
reported last year that 48 percent of Navy and
Marine Corps personnel had used drugs during a
30-day period, compaired with 41 percent of the
Army, and 21 percent of the Air Force. But new or
not, the figures are a cause for real concern, for
they mean that a significant porportion of the
aimed forces might be impaired or even in-
capacitated at any given moment of supreme na-
tional emergency.
There is documented evidence for instance, that
aircraft maintenance personnel have used dope
while working on jets flying from Navy bases and
carriers. The Air Force has found airmen guar-
ding SAC bombers to be high on drugs. The Army
conducted a crackdown on dope used by troops in
Germany last year and arrested 8,876 soldiers-
half a division.
Shocking as these incidents are, they should not
surprise us. A National Institute on Drug Abuse
study found a year ago that 66 percent of high
school seniors reported using drugs. These, of
course, are the very youngsters who are recruited
into the armed forces, bringing with them an ac-
ceptance of drug abuse.
Although it has been slow to acknowledge
publicly tiie extent erf the problem, the Navy had
long been aware erf drug abuse and has taken
some steps to deal with it. Appropriately, the
Navy expects to maintain higher disciplinary
standards in its ranks than that prevailing on the
outside. Just so.
H And even there is little hope of stamping out
nHabuse in the armed services so long as it
civilian society, still the effort must
W The fight against the drug problem
[national decision to rebuild our
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age misses budget cutters
WASHINGTON- President Reagan
promised the American people that his
administration will pursue every
jK^vIly^This budgeSters
don’t seem to have gotten the message.
The Office of Management and
Budget has put a limit on the number of
Inspectors general and their staffs. The
IGs are supposed to be the taxpayers
first line of defense against waste and
corruption.
But the budget-cutters have set a
limit of 5,500 employees for all of the IG
offices in the federal government.
Critics of this penny-wise, pound foolish
policy have amassed sane-grim figures
that show just how inadequate this
police force is.
Here’s one example: The En-
vironmental Protection Agency has a
$29 billion construction program. It in-
volves 12,000 federal grants. Yet the
EPA has a grand total of only 10 in-
vestigators in its IG office.
Any third-grader could figure that
out: Each EPA investigator is suppos-
ed to <Wsee 1,200 government grants.
That’s bad enough. But EPA officials
told Congress that of their 10 in-
vestigators, only three or four are pro-
fessionally qualified. The rest are still
being trained as criminal investigators.
In fid, the agency’s investigative
strength is spread so thin that there
isn’t a single investigator for the
12-state Chicago region. The 13-state
Western Region also doesn’t have a
single EPA investigator; and that
region includes California, the nation's
most populous state.
‘ There are other examples: At the
Commerce Department, it has been
estimated that if the inspector
general’s staff tried to do every job it ia
required by law to do, with their pre-
sent staff they could do a management
audit only once every 36 years.
And at the Labor Department, me
IG’s office pointed with pride to the job
it has done weeding out waste and fraud
in Comprehensive Employment and
Training Act programs. But officials
admitted that it is the only program
they have been able to investigate.
They don’t have the staff to look into the
activities of the rest of the Labor
Department.
Rep. Eliott Levitas, D-Ga., is bitter
about the administration’s failure to
give adequate funding to the inspectors
general. He accuses President Reagan
of “blowing smoke in the eyes of the
American public.”
Partisan rhetoric aside, it is strange
that the parsimonious Republican ad-
ministration has seen fit to pinch pen-
nies on the inspectors general budget.
We have been told that for eveify dollar
spent on IG investigations, the govern-
meiit gets beds anywhere from to $7.
That’s the kind of economy in govern-
ment that a Republican ought to ap-
preciate.
TEMPERAMENTAL MISSILES:
America’s nuclear umbrella may not
work in the rain. According to a
classified Defense Department report,
if it ia raining or snowing in the Soviet
Union when the United States launches
its missiles, they may miss the targets.
The secret report reveals that there is !
no such thing as a missile system that
can perform in all weather conditions.
States tiie document:
“The missile warhead is eroded by
ice-cloud particles ami water droplets
upon re-entry through regions of
adverse weather. This can result in a
loss of aerodynamic configuration and
hence a decrease in the accuracy of the
missile. In the extreme case, physical
breakup of the re-entry vehicle can
result.”
What the Pentagon is admitting is
that, if there is bad weather over the
Soviet Union, the warheads may miss
their targets. And bad weather over
Russia is not all tipt rare.
The secret Pentagon report also says
that high winds and fluctuations in air
density and temperature may affect the
accuracy of the missiles.
What it all boils down to is that
America’s nuclear force may not be as
effective as we’ve been led to believe it
is.
HEADLINES & FOOTNOTES: The
FBI is now wrapping up its probe of
allegations that Paula Parkinson,
Washington’s sexiest lobbyist, trated
her favors for votes. Now we’ve learned
that the G-men are also quietly in-
vestigating charges that the attractive
tattletale was involved in a Kansas in-
surance swindle. Paula denies the
allegations.
--Secret Service agents were
X-raying the mail delivered to the
White House recently when a greeting
card addressed to the president sudden-
ly began flashing. As it turned out, the
card was rigged with batteries so it
would light up. But for one terrible mo-
ment, the Secret Service aents thought
it was a bomb.
-Earlier this year, a U.S. govern-
ment geologist predicted that Peru
would be rocked this summer by violent
earthquakes. It’s a little awkward for
the United States to be forecasting
another nation’s disasters, so the State
Department hunted up scientists who
would refute the geologist’s prediction.
But just in case, State Department
employees are quietly being trained in
how to deal with emergency evacua-
tions in an earthquake zone. The Peru-
vians have not been informed about the
training program.
Serves as silent witness
Human rights chair empty
By Christopher Flannery
Dr. Flannery is an Editor at Public
J||March, Syndicated T
(c) Public Research, Syndicates, 1981
The hearings and the interviews, the
headlines and the news updates are
over, and the chair of the Assistant
Secretary of State for Human Rights
and Humanitarian Affairs stands emp-
ty. It is no great matter.
The empty chair may be looked upon
as a silent witness to the emptiness of
the discussions in the Senate confirma-
tion hearings and in the broader public
forum which was captivated momen-
tarily by the “hot issue” of Human
Rights. It is a sad and ironic monument
to the emptiness of Human Rights
themselves as they are concieved today
by some of their most ardent ad-
vocates.
Generally speaking, the issue before
the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee as they considered Mr. Reagan’s
nominee for this minor position, was
whether or not the Human Rights policy
of the Carter administration shold be
continued. Polls demonstrated and
commentators confirmed that this at
least was one policy of the Carter
presidency that had not been repudated
by the voters jast November.
Democratic and Republican politicians
and members of the press warned that
President Reagan could not afford to
reject this policy as he had the
economic policy of the previous ad-
ministration. President Carter himself
emerged from silence to deliver a reaf-
firming his, and the nation’s,
"commitment” ti this policy.
But this speech, like previous
speeches, and likethe Carter Human
Rights policy itself, leaves one troubled
with the uneasy question: Commit-
ment to what, and why?
"...1 am convinced," said the former
president, “that there is a broad and
pervasive conviction in this country
that freedom and the dignity of human
beings are fundamental values of the
United States which are worthy of pro-
tection...If we do not proclaim our
belief in freedom, justice and
democratic values must be evident.”
It is this “commitment to values”
that underlies the Carter Human Rights
policy. The phrase taken out of context
stands as a shocking exhortation to ar-
bitrary willfulness. Mr. Carter, and the
other decent men who count themselves
supporters of his stand on Human
Rights, would indignantly and rightly
condemn those vicious “Doctrines of
the Will” of which this phrase, ex-
tracted from its context, is so perfect an
expression. It is a great tragedy for
Mr. Carter, and still more for the cause
of Human Rights to which he is sincere-
ly committed, that placing his commit-
ment in context does not rescue it from
its arbitrariness or its emptiness.
It is true that he speaks of
“freedom,” “dignity,” and “justice.”
But what is the status of these lofty
sounding words? Again, they are
“values,” or,as if this gave them
greater stature, “fundamental values.”
But why is Mr. Carter committed to
these fundamental values instead of to
the equally fundamental values that
are their opposites? The only reason of-
fered is that there is a “braod and per-
vasive conviction in this country” that
they are fundamental values. The in-
ference is inescapable, that it is not the
inherent truth or worth of the values
themselves that dignifies and demands
commitment. It is rather the commit-
ment (or “conviction”) that dignifies
the values. That the commitment may
be shared by many does not alter its ab-
solute arbitrariness any more than
murder, rape and incest grow in dignity
the more widely they are practiced.
Mr. Carter’s thinking (and the
Human Rights policy to which such
thinking gave rise) is a faithful reflec-
tion of the most powerful intellectual
doctrines of our age. These doctrines
appear under various names
(Positivism, Relativism, Behaviorism)
but they are uniform in the central con-
viction on which the authority of their
teaching depends. A respected expo-
nent of Positivism expressed this con-
viction in its pure form in a book first
published when Mr. Carter was a school
boy: "It is impossible to find a
criterion for determining the validity of
ethical judgements...sentences which
simply express moral judgement do not
say anything. They are pure expres-
sionsof feeling and as such do not come
under the category of truth and
falsehood...”
This deleterious doctrine required a
new vocabulary to distinguish moral
judgements, which say nothing, from
those human judgements that do say
“something.” The key words in this
new vocabulary were “values”
(nothing), and “facts” (something).
It is the “broad and pervasive" in-
fluence of this vocabulary and of the
ethical teaching corresponding to it,
that is the moral ground of the Carter
Human Rights policy, though he, and
most of his supporters , surely did not
understand this. Unwittingly, the coun-
try was “commited” to Human Rights
which were “values," and therefore to
values, which were nothing. Of course,
there is a true moral ground for Human
Rights, and for a Human Rights policy,
and that is, happily for us, the same
ground for which this country was
founded~it is those “self-evident
truths” that every American school boy
once knew by heart, but which are
literally as nothing in the moral
universe of the Carter Human Rights
policy.
It is the crowning irony of this affair,
that President Carter, who prided
himself above all-who was probably
elected above all-for his moral
qualities, should leave as his one
unrepudiated legacy such a mockery of
morality itself.
Do you have an opiftierri?
i nal editing such as gi
The Polk County Enterprise en-
courages readers to submit let-
tyra voicing their views er opi-
The letters will be published in
the Enterprise’s Letter to the
column in Thursday’s or
normal editing such as grammar,
punctuation and spelling. The let-
ters must be written within the
confines of good taste.
. :m-y- ■
The letters will also be subject
to editing for libelous or
^ftthmlt tetters, afP them to
“Letters to the Editor,” Polk
P.O. Boat
k
enterMise
ALVIN HOLLEY, PUBLISHER
Entered as Second-Class Matter at the Post Office at Livingston,
Texas 77351 under the Act of Congress of March 3,1897.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
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SUI»(^ON IUTES - 811.51 per year, to county, fUM per year?
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County PaMnUnf^Co.** *** T5r*er 10 Livingston, Texas by the Polk
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White, Barbara. Polk County Enterprise (Livingston, Tex.), Vol. 98, No. 51, Ed. 1 Thursday, June 25, 1981, newspaper, June 25, 1981; Livingston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth781335/m1/4/?rotate=90: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Livingston Municipal Library.