My father, too, took an early retirement due to the shenanigans of a crappy appointee. He has a long list of achievments, working for the Gov’t, and took great pleasure in giving top return for his modest salary. He also took great pleasure in rooting out incompetance, stupidity, and corruption, where he could. Now he’s a free-lancer, and the Gov’t is lacking his (highly regarded) services (or paying five times more for them), while the venal people he used to keep in check are pursuing their own agendae at the expence of their agency’s mission.
Narile, Rowley’s “climate of fear” did not begin in 1993. I have been reading those same criticisms of the FBI since the mid 1970s. Note that Rowley did not highlight a fear of crossing some PC line, she criticized the excessive bureaucracy of the FBI and the bureaucratic rules (and implied pecking orders and backstabbing) that prevented anyone from addressing any issue outside the rigid chain of command. These criticisms of the FBI were rampant under Reagan (and were voiced under Carter and Ford).
Tranquilis, I have no doubt that appointees have disrupted departments in many cases. I have several stories of people leaving for similar problems (although my stories all date to the 1982 - 1990 period). However, it takes more than a few disrupted departments to destroy the effectiveness of an entire agency.
tomndebb, if you reread my post carefully, you will notice I didn’t say it started with the Clintons, I said their appointments increased the degree of the problem to a very large degree by their appointments. Indeed my fathers complaints go back to the mid to late eighties, but he saw a marked increase in the idiocy of the services ( Civil, Intelligence, and Military, he worked with all three.) starting around 1994-1995. Most of which were caused by badly implimented/thoughtout policy changes decided upon by said appointees.