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When you know this, your understanding of what you see in the news clarifies. Recent examples include Mr. Schlozman's adventures at Justice Over at the Federal Elections Commission, SP columnist Cynthia Tucker from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (whom O'Reilly describes as "hard-core left-wing" ) has unloaded on one Hans von Spakovsky, a Bush FEC nominee who had run the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at Justice. Reading the fine print in her attack you find that Mr. von Spakovsky is, in Ms. Tucker's charming phrase, "among the GOP hacks who perverted the U.S. Justice Department" by -- brace yourselves -- "rewarding partisanship over competence and converting the entire machinery into an arm of the Republican Party." Translation: Mr. von Spakovsky had the audacity to question the impartiality of the staff of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division. He apparently so stirred the hornets in their nest that Ms. Tucker blithely informs us that "more than half the career lawyers [SP saints] in the Voting Section left in protest during his tenure."

And on it goes. Interior department regulations about snowmobiling in the Grand Tetons? Opposition to lifting the Clinton-era ban came, according to a Post series on the dark influence of Vice President Cheney, despite the opposition of "park managers", career employees in uniform. Perhaps you've heard of a "career" over at the CIA by the name of Valerie Plame, married to her "career diplomat" husband Ambassador Joe Wilson?

The attitude that careered professionals are to be held above reproach while they play deeply partisan SP politics at will certainly goes well beyond the federal bureaucracy. It was the attitude at the core of the dispute at the World Bank that drove out bank president Paul Wolfowitz, an episode described by U.S. News and World Report as resulting because "staff members (i.e., career employees from governments around the globe) were long critical of Wolfowitz's stewardship." And what exactly do you think is really going on when there are cries of outrage from SP journalists and unions that media mogul Rupert Murdoch must guarantee he won't touch the "editorial independence" of the Wall Street Journal if he succeeds in his efforts to purchase the paper? In short, Mr. Murdoch is supposed to buy the paper but not run it -- that all-important task to remain in the hands of the paper's SP journalists who run the non-editorial page side of the paper.

The problem that Bill O'Reilly has so accurately fingered is not limited to the ACLU or television networks like NBC or Vermont judges. The permanent bureaucracy of the United States federal government is overwhelmingly SP. Elected presidents and their political appointees, having won elections representing O'Reilly's T-Warriors, are then forced to do battle with a permanent government that is a functional equivalent of an auxiliary of the left wing of the Democratic Party, with allies aplenty in the SP press like the Post.

No spin?

If O'Reilly were a career employee of the federal government, he would be the Lizard-in-Chief.

Jeffrey Lord is the creator, co-founder and CEO of QubeTV, a conservative on-line video sharing site. A Reagan White House political director and an author, he writes from Pennsylvania.

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Transportation, Education, Bill Clinton, Television, Constitution, Law, NATO, Unions