You're a treasure, Ted. Thoughtprovoking and balanced article. Incredibly well done.

I'm not sure that I believe the phrase "growing numbers of independent voters". It is true that a lot of people are reluctant to identify with the political parties, but long term trend--since about 1990--has been a decline in the number of voters who genuinely act independently, which is to say that they will split tickets or switch parties from one election to the next.

As far as the major protest movements go, they may pay lip service to the notion of protesting the partisan system as a whole, but by and large the tea partiers have figured out that they belong in the Republican camp, and the Occupy people will be domesticated as a wing of the Democratic party if they--and the party--know what's best for them.

As far as corruption and scandal go, I can't help but wonder if it is an inherent result of a sharp partisan divide. With more landslide states and landslide counties than in recent memory, and the close balance in the strength of the two parties, money and grassroots support is the name of the game. Just as patronage was the lifeblood of the party system of the 19th century, so too will organizers and donors expect to be rewarded for being on the winning team.

Spot on, Ted. As Peggy Noonan asked on ABC yesterday: "Where are the grown-ups?" And it's not just government and political institutions that are falling down. Similar problems are evident in the church, the military, sports, the arts, non-profits -- and let's not forget the media. Who can we trust these days? It's pretty hard to determine. Meanwhile, now everyone wants to know the stories those SS guys told you about Nixon and Agnew. Is the statute of limitations up or are you still sworn to secrecy?

The entropic failures of public institutions are clear enough -- on all levels. The real questions of interest are: Why is this happening everywhere all at once? and, Can anything be done about it?

The causes are not too hard to identify. Government works best when its participants are motivated by some level of idealism. The death of American idealism was one of the hidden casualties of the Vietnam War. The last great wave of positive public idealism was the Civil Rights Movement.

What we have now is individual greed masquerading as idealism. To the extent that it works at all, an ethos of greed is better suited to the private sector. Personal greed in the public sector invariably leads to disaster.

Our present angry condition of political gridlock is obviously incapable of generating the consensus necessary for a new wave of public idealism. Good people can still be found in government, and they can be effective within limited spheres, but in this era of darkness they must be guided by their own internal compasses.

It seems inevitable that the next wave of public idealism will have some sort of ecological vision at its core. Reality will dictate it. Ignoring environmental problems, and indeed even denying their existence, can only make these problems worse. At the point when they become truly intolerable, things will begin to happen -- from riots and mayhem on one end of the continuum to community gardens on the other.

Where the self-appointed pundits seem most grievously wrong on these matters is in their persistent and desperate hope that the existing political elites can somehow lead us out of this mess. I find myself aligned with those who see change having to come up from the bottom. There are two basic reasons for this. First and most obviously, the pervasive money culture that dominates current politics has corrupted the system in its entirety -- right, left and center. The second and less apparent reason is that elitist solutions are intrinsically top-down mandates. Imposing top-down mandates, even ones of an impeccably beneficial nature, on an unwilling populace eventually requires a police state. A harmonious process of fundamental change can only occur when the society itself has internalized the essential principles; this process must start at the bottom and work its way up. It will no doubt be messy, but there is really no other way.

This piece reads like a free association stream of cranky complaints, but it's hard to see what it tells us about current politics and culture. Oh please, the Secret Service never engaged in this kind of behavior before in the wonderful old days? They watched and enabled JFK to engage in serial, sleazy sexcapades, remember? Who knows what they personally were up to while JFK cavorted. Most Secret Service agents are exemplary today, same as in the old days. But there were bad apples and cases of bad judgment then and now. Nothing's changed. Just because TVD wasn't privy to it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

"This piece reads like a free association stream of cranky complaints, but it's hard to see what it tells us about current politics and culture." So does every response to a TVD article by Harris Meyer.

I personally find it really hard to believe secret service agents in the late 1950s and early 1960s would have gone out and hired prostitutes. if they had, we probably would have heard about it by now.

Ted Van Dyk is party to ethical transgression by Secret Service agents he knows, then decries for pay in column about how other Secret Service agents have lost ethical compass. DC culture in a nutshell. Have you met my friend Pogo, Mr Van Dyk? http://www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm

The political parties have built a monster in the form of the national security and welfare state. They never fear the monster when their people are in control of it, so they never work to disarm it, only to wrest control of it from the other party. They never decry the monster, only the people temporarily in control of it, because their time at the controls will come again. And so the monster grows in size, complexity, intrusiveness and arrogance. Whether the person at the controls is named Bush or Obama makes absolutely no difference. It's the monster that gives him the power, that power breeds a sense of entitlement to rule, and the monster's power makes its civil service tenders feel like an elite priesthood, not a group of citizen-servants to their fellow countrymen and -women.

It's time to start dismantling the monster.

Thanks for the generally thoughtful comments. NickBob should know, by the way, that I am not paid for my Crosscut pieces. They are my contribution to a worthwhile venture.

Pepper2000 wonders if the Tea Party and Occupy movements are not symptoms of the present sharp partisan divide. I think not. The Tea Party movement
was a clear response to the federal government's apparent inability to
cope with deficit and debt issues. It swept out officeholders of both major parties who were perceived as "soft" on thowse issues. The Occupy movement has been more diffuse and lacked a focused agenda. But it, too, clearly has sprung from perceived public- and private-sector abuses which
have damaged ordinary citizens. Tea Partiers have become a force, in particular, in the Republican Party and Occupiers a less disciplined influence on the Democratic side. But their origins lay elsewhere.

It's hard to escape public-sector-related horror stories. I could have
included in this piece the highly publicized General Services Administration follies. A glance at today's Seattle Times front page, alone, would tell any reader about big changes coming in Metro bus routes
which are likely to anger public-transit riders; about the costly Seattle-Kingston ferry which is costing taxpayers $35,000 per rider; about the
astounding U.S. pledge of financial and military assistance to Afghanistan
through 2024; and about the U.S. Supreme Court's review of an Arizona immigration law which had its origins in rage about federal-government
stewardship of its border-control responsiblity. On page 2 is a story about a Government Accountability Office finding that an administration
program to boost Medicare Advantage quality was wasting $8 billion.

On a local level, voters are highly aware of inefficient, tax-eating projects such as light rail, the South Lake Union and First Hill trolleys, and a hugely expensive Mercer Mess redo which, when completed, will not have reduced traffic congestion even a bit.

Voters react with anger and frustration, and a sense of helplessness,
as these things take place. At the polling place, they cnn vote the "ins" out. But, as several have pointed out, both public- and private-sector
failings have their roots in many places and cannot, in any case, be remedied in one swoop at the polls.

John Hamer asks about the Nixon-Agnew revelations the Secret Service
agents shared with me so many years ago. I'll only say that they went principally to Nixon's "paranoid outlook" and to their observations leading them to conclude that "Agnew is a damned crook." As it turned out, publicly disclosed later events proved them right.

Actually, the Arizona immigration law had its origins in the Corrections Corporation of America working with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council to pass a law that would help fill its for-profit beds with illegal immigrants who were detained. See the NPR and other good reports on this last year. One other point. Equating true corruption scandals like the Reagan Administration's huge, multi-billion dollar HUD scandals with issues like the Medicare Advantage quality issue is totally bogus. You can legitimately question whether it was effective to pay those Medicare Advantage plans more to encourage quality care. But there was no issue of corruption there. That's a policy matter. Come on, TVD, lumping all these various complaints together does not produce a useful discussion. It's just sloppy thinking.

Either those agents you sat with were whistleblowing, in which case good for them, or they were crossing ethical lines. Did they expect action from you by imparting the information, and either way did you act on it? If both answers are no, you were enabling their transgressions and they were enabling the transgressions of those they guarded. Publicly employed bodyguards have every right to be disgusted by legal actions they consider personally immoral, but if they see criminal activity and do nothing, they are nothing short of accomplices. They don't work for the president, they work for the country by protecting those they guard from physical harm, not from the consequences of illegal activity.

dbreneman, Big Government was erected at least in part as a counter to the power of Big Business. Now that Big Business has captured and turned Big Government, my question to you is that after having dismantled Big Government, do you expect to like living in a world run by untrammeled Big Business? Would that world have any respect for individuals? Count me among the doubters. Libertarian utopias are playgrounds for bullies.

What characterizes today's political landscape is that the partisan divide is highly ideological and even cultural in nature. It has reached the point where liberals and conservatives nearly comprise two separate social classes, each with separate media, consumer preferences, places to live, and assumptions that are so different as to make communication difficult. If anything, the two major parties still have to catch up to the new reality, though the GOP is much ahead of the Democrats.

With the partisan landscape so defined, I think that the protest movements fit squarely the definition of partisan movements. The Occupiers, for instance, despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness, present what is very much a Blue State vision. "We are the 49%", though not as catchy as their current slogan, would be more apt.

I agree largely with Harris. This article is pretty unfocused and seems to be a 'kitchen sink' article that talks about everything from the tea party, occupy wall street to unpaid taxes, Secret Service hookers and Solyndra.

I would also vigorously disagree with his opening statement. Namely, that the Secret Service scandal "feeds the mindsets producing the Tea Party and the Occupy movements."

To the extent that these 2 movements share common ground, it would be on a macroeconomic scale. Both the movements have voiced concerns about the bank bailouts, which have been dismissed by both parties. TVD's comment that Occupy Wall Street is somehow aligned with the Democratic party is complete nonsense. They are raging against corporate greed, bailouts, austerity, the Fed, the wars, the mortgage crisis, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and many other things. They also have shown strong support for Ron Paul, who has been a thorn in the side of both parties with his libertarian views.

If the Tea Party hadn't been purchased by Corporate America, it would probably still share a few things in common with Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street has the argument pretty much right. Namely, corporate greed and corporate welfare, which has led to corporate and political corruption, is at the core of many of our problems.

Until the Citizens United case gets reversed or addressed, our whole political system is doomed. Solyndra and the Secret Service hookers are just sideshows for TV news and talk shows to fume about.

Here's a much better article on the whole Columbia fiasco...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/19/america-for-gods-sake-pay-your-whores/

As for the title of this article, "Government Institutions Falling Down".. well we don't collect enough taxes to pay for the services we've committed to. We're headed to a very rocky landing and it's not that far off.

Gary. You're exactly right. But the media in power is too corrupt, inept or lazy to tell the truth anymore.

Me and a friend of mine had a 2 hour conversation with another less liberal friend of ours (a corporate lawyer) who is also a fan of the Fox Propaganda channel. He's not an Obama fan and said the solution to our woes is to lower taxes so the wealth can 'trickle down'. (yes, people still believe that rubbish). For 2 hours we argued that the tax rates under Reagan were as high as 70%. He would not believe this for a minute, even though it's a historical fact. I was taught this in high school government class. He would not believe it.

Top tax rate in 1980 was 70%
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=213

This is just a FACT. I have little hope for our country because even the smart people are stupid when it comes to basic political knowledge. And the media and pundits are too busy talking about Hookergate to see that the big banks and the economy are still on the tipping point.

WSJ - Bankruptcy Beat
What Would Happen if a Big Bank Failed?
http://blogs.wsj.com/bankruptcy/2012/04/13/what-would-happen-if-a-big-bank-failed/

_Richard Borkowski is absolutely right on this one. Please give him my Editor's Pick from last year.

I'm not talking about eliminating government. Government has a vigorous role to play in a free economy. It should enforce weights and measures, prosecute fraud, guarantee contracts and protect honest people from those who would prey upon them. What it should not do is read your emails, place black boxes in your car, prevent you from engaging freely in contracts with others or compel you to engage in contracts under duress. It's a specious argument to accuse the proponent of freedom of being a proponent of anarchy.

And "NB" goes on to write: "Count me among the doubters. Libertarian utopias are playgrounds for bullies."

Well, I can understand how, in this world totally free of economic or political bullies, you'd be hesitant to take such a chance! But seriously, the foundation of libertarianism is that all human interactions should be voluntary, that government should defend peoples' rights and protect the people from fraud, and that no one should be able to initiate the use of force against another. If you find a mandate for bullying in that, I'm interesting in hearing where.

We're still waiting to hear TVD's responses to NickBob's sharp questions about what the Secret Service agents told him about Nixon and Agnew, whether there were issues of laws or government ethics being broken (it sounds like there was), what the agents' reporting responsibility was, what TVD's reporting responsibility was, and whether the agents violated Secret Service confidentiality rules and potentially endangered national security by disclosing this information. That's actual news, in contrast to the rest of TVD's rambling column. There's no legal, ethical, or journalistic reason not to tell this full story.

It is a sad day when someone with as much Washington inside knowledge falls for the Republican spin on Solyndra. If TVD can't get his facts right on Solyndra, how much of the rest of this piece is factual?

Mr Borkowski - Ronald Reagan was not president in 1980. He was inaugurated in January 1981, and congress cut taxes soon thereafter.

PJS. Bad wording on my part. I meant the comment more as a reference to a period in time, which was the 80s. During Reagan's tenure, the top rate was dropped to 50%, which is still much higher than the top rate today.

My story was meant to be more about how ignorant people are about historical facts and how they will defend the propaganda in their heads as if it's real.

Pythagoras. I couldn't agree with you more. This whole article shows just how much another institution has degraded in our country... the media.

The Fox Propanda channel continues to focus on trivial things like Solyndra and I continue to be amazed at how they are able to lead around the other media outlets like a bunch of sheep.

This year's Presidential campaign in the first post Citizens United Presidential election. When you combine the billions that foreign countries and corporations can now insert into our elections with the willingness of the corporate media to do anything for money, you do not have a pretty picture.

No doubt there are going to be some pretty ugly propaganda hit pieces against President Obama. We'll see if there are any real media people in the United States who can sift through the propaganda and report the facts.

To Crosscut editors:

Folks, the more I think about NickBob’s questions, the more I think Crosscut and TVD have a serious ethics in journalism problem on their hands, and maybe more.
TVD writes 43 years after the fact that two senior Secret Service agents revealed to him in 1969 that President Nixon and Vice President Agnew were engaged in wrongful behavior. Then TVD then tells us in his posted comment that the revelations concerned Nixon’s paranoid behavior and Agnew’s conduct as a “damned crook.” He does not indicate that he reported these revelations to anyone, in contrast to his reporting President Johnson’s phone-tapping to Vice President Humphrey.
The Secret Service agents had sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution, yet there is no indication that they reported this conduct by the President and Vice President. We don’t know from TVD’s account whether he was still a government employee at the time of this conversation with the agents and thus whether he was still sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution.
We know Nixon’s paranoia led him to engage in criminal and unconstitutional conduct, and we know Agnew’s behavior led to a criminal conviction. Would TVD reporting this conversation to law enforcement or to Congress have brought revelations of Nixon and Agnew’s illegal conduct to public attention years sooner? Why didn’t he report this?
As NickBob pointed out, if TVD is going to hold himself out as a news commentator and is going to criticize public officials for alleged wrongdoing, he is obligated to report whatever knowledge he has of wrongdoing. He can’t do this selectively or he loses credibility as a news commentator.
The first obligation of journalists is to the public. As a journalist, if I revealed that I had covered up knowledge about illegal behavior by high public officials or business leaders, news organizations would not hire me to write for them.
I think Crosscut editors have to make a decision about whether to allow TVD to write for them if he doesn’t fully disclose details of this highly newsworthy incident. I’ll bet national political reporters would be interested in reporting on whether Secret Service agents knew about illegal behavior by Nixon and Agnew as early as 1969.

To Crosscut editors:

I recommend that you block Harris Meyer's ability to comment on articles by Mr Van Dyk. Mr Meyer clearly has an axe to grind, personal or professional, and I would hate to lose Mr Van Dyk as a contributor to Crosscut because of Mr Meyer's inevitable attacks on nearly every column written by Mr Van Dyk.

PJS. You can't be serious. Censorship really? Mr. Van Dyk worked in D.C. for Presidential Administrations. I doubt any attacks or comments in this forum compare to what he experienced in D.C.

You have to admit that TVD's revelations of secret service agents whistleblowing to him are, interesting to say the very least.

No doubt he wrote it to be provocative and controversial. Well, now he's got that controversy. I don't see how any of that is any fault of Harris.

When a scandal broke about a US Senator from Oregon who habitually sexually harassed young women, I read a column by Maureen O'Dowd about it. In her column she wrote that this senator's behavior was well-known around Washington, that she had witnessed it first hand on a number of occasions, and that young women were strongly advised not to get into an elevator with him.

I was shocked. She essentially admitted not only to being an accomplice to his actions, but to failing in her duty as a journalist. By knowing about this and not writing about it, she became a party to it.

Yet that is often the way with "journalists". They have to participate to retain their precious access. They have to compromise their principles to do their jobs.

I suspect that it's the same with Secret Service agents.

There isn't anyone who can claim the moral high ground here.

Maybe Mr Meyer can list all the people he would, in the same position as Mr Van Dyke, have reported behavior that was clearly illegal. Let's see, how about:

J Edgar Hoover: Mr Meyer, would going to him have done any good?

Attorney General of the US: Mr Meyer, would going to John Mitchell, or perhaps his deputy Richard Kleindienst, have been a good use of time?

Mike Mansfield, leader of the majority in the Senate. Would he have been good to contact?

John W. McCormack, who was speaker of the house?

Or, which reporters would have been good? Seymour Hersh perhaps? At the time, he had his hands full with My Lai,but later he did write about some domestic scandals that occurred during the 1960s.

In general, it seems every time Mr Van Dyke writes something, Mr Meyer writes comments that come across as second guessing with data that more often than not is suspect. I don't think Mr Meyer should be banned from Crosscut, but in general, as soon as I see his comments, I skip by them.

Another question is "what is the role of secret service?" What is their duty to report bad behavior, or illegal behavior, and to whom? There is a real tradeoff of protecting the president being made more difficult if the secret service is not completely trusted by the President. That is one reason why the events in Columbia are so serious, they undercut the trust the president has.

sjenner, a federal judge did not buy your argument as advanced by Bill Clinton in the Monicagate case. Read it below. As far as who TVD could have reported this conversation to, the events of Watergate showed there were courageous members of Congress of both parties who were willing to aggressively investigate the President and other top Nixon administration officials. There also were aggressive investigative reporters like Jack Anderson around. And if TVD was so close to so many top Democratic officials, as he frequently tells us he was, he surely knew who he could report it to and who would be likely to take action.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/order052298.htm
Finally, the Secret Service is composed of public employees who are law enforcement officers. The Secret Service's law enforcement obligation and its duty to report criminal activity under 28 U.S.C. § 535(b) provide persuasive policy reasons in favor of compelling grand jury testimony.

Checked back this a.m. to find this surprisingly long comment stream and all the attention paid to my dinner conversation some 43 years ago with Secret Service agents.

First, the agents did not report to me any specific incidents of criminal activity, constitutional violations, etc. What they did report was Nixon's generally paranoid, surrounded-by-enemies outlook toward the world and what they regarded as borderline, smarmy characters with whom Agnew came into regular contact. They also reported, by the way, that both Nixon and Agnew treated their Secret Service protective details with less than respect. Nixon, for instance, did not communicate directly with his SS driver and detail chief, sitting in the front seat of his limo, but relayed instructions to them by calling the SS director at the Treasury Department and having him pass instructions down the chain of command.
Weird.

There was nothing new in the characterization of Nixon as paranoid.
Agnew was not really well known to anyone. Later it would turn out that
he was taking bribes from those smarmy characters.

There was nothing for me to report to anyone. I filed the information
mentally. If the Secret Service agents were to have reported their
observations, it would have been to their SS boss at Treasury. He would then have reported to the Secy of Treasury, appointed by Nixon. It would had to have been a serious breech for the agents to step out of their basic protective roles and make any such reports. Specific evidence of wrongdoine would have been required.

I knew that the agents were speaking to me out of their frustration and
treated their comments as confidential. I did not write about them, by the way, to be "provocative and controversial," as a reader speculates,
but simply to give readers a picture of how things were. Very small molehill.

@sjenner, even during Nixon's day, there were US District Attorneys that put the law ahead of politics, such as what actually happened later during Mr. Agnew's tenure. As Mr Harris has pointed out, Mr Van Dyk was well placed to know which official to go to in such a difficult situation, or at the very least who to consult to find such a person. In the press, the short quick answer is Jack Anderson, but there was no shortage of Nixon haters in those days who would have welcomed the chance for a scoop like this. The Secret Service are *officers of the law*, not personal servants of an elected autocrat, their duty ought to be clear not only to themselves, but to ordinary citizens like ourselves. Those that blame the president for the illegal actions of his bodyguards suppose he's a gangleader overseeing his goons, and not what was in living memory called the leader of the free world. One more way that Obama and Eisenhower are alike, in that their detractors on the right fantasize about them.
Mr. Van Dyk decries (pro bono, to his credit) a state of affairs he has played his part in advancing, as shown by his storytelling. His failure to act 40 years ago has passed the statute of limitations, the agents may well have died or retired, and the wrongs that happened as a result cannot now be righted. If he and Crosscut were to see the light on this it would change very little in the larger picture. But it wouldn't hurt.

Amazing that TVD considers it a "very small molehill" that senior Secret Service agents revealed to him that Spiro Agnew was regularly meeting with people they considered unsavory -- which led them to describe Agnew as a "damn crook" -- and neither the agents nor TVD did anything to report possible criminal behavior by the Vice President of the United States. There was "nothing for TVD to report"? Here he had worked for Vice President Humphrey, whom Nixon defeated in 1968, and he had no interest in bringing to the attention of law enforcement officials, members of Congress, or the news media information that the Vice President was consorting with criminal types? That's astounding. As to the Secret Service agents' responsibilities, read Judge Holloway's opinion in the Clinton case concerning their law enforcement duties, which I linked to above. Yes, TVD, we get the picture of "how things were" and your moral and ethical compass.

Ah, missed an update. I'll take Mr Van Dyk's word on the substance of the conversation, he is certainly correct that Nixon's style was no secret, but I'd hope he had a quiet word with some well placed official about the concerns of those agents regarding Mr Agnew's associates. As to the 'weirdness' of using the chain of command, this is the guy that dressed his White House Guards in the uniforms of a 30's middle European kingdom. It's reassuring that he didn't care to take direct charge of his armed guards as his modern pretorians.

@Harris, I refer you to Crosscut's Media Terms of Service Page, section 15-
http://crosscut.com/about/agreement/
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY. WE, OUR SUBSIDIARIES, OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES AND OUR SUPPLIERS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES ........ WE MAKE NO WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS REGARDING THE INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THE SITE, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTY AS TO THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, TIMELINESS OR ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THE SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.
Disclaiming *any* warranty about accuracy is wise, legally anyway, even if they imply they hold themselves to a higher standard. And if Mr Brewster cares to, he's free to rewrite that section and tell the world that he stands by the text he publishes.