The Leaf-Chronicle from Clarksville, Tennessee • 10

Page 10A The Leaf-Chronicle, Clarksville, Tenn. Tuesday, October 14, 198C THE LEAF-CHRONICLE lusjcio Iro Published by the Leof-Chronicle Co. A Division ol Moltimedio Inc. r. Kll fT J-r ATCrit Jquo Of 200 Commerce Street Clorksville.Jennessee 37040 (615) 552 1 808 I 1 Carter Policy By NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN The most telling critique of President Carter's management of foreign policy comes, not from his Republican opponents, but from 7 ---r-77.

GENE WASHER- LUTHER B.THIGPEN President Carter foreign policy Pubsfer 1 A Member of the Associated Press The Associated Press is entitled exclusivly to the use for publication of all of the local news printed in this newspaper as well as all AP news dispatches. letters TdThe Editor ore encouraged. All-letters are subiect to editing and must be signed with name, address and telephone number No unsigned letters will be published Leaf-Chronicle Editorials Safe: i I roads? His Cool The President Has Kilpatricl OX) Col. Phil Hooper, vice president and chief Tennessee spokesman for the Louisville -and Nashville has taken exception to a report prepared by the Tennessee PublicService Commission on the condition of railroads in Tennessee. The PSC says tracks in Tennessee have 19,096 defects, an increase of 241 percent since 1978.

Col; Hooper says such a report could discourage industry, from locating in Tennessee. Hooper claims the report is distorted because it counts defects on sidetracks and spurs which are "seldom used." Hooper claims LAN's-" 700 miles of mainline track in Tennessee are in "top Hooper's disclaimers ring hoUow. The according to government figures, is one of the most profitable in the nations In a period when most railroads are struggling to stay alive economicly, the is doing reasonably well. At the same time, the also has one of the highest accident rates of all CHICAGO-It is a curious thing. The Carter campaign, which once seemed so smooth and I professional, suddenly has begun to unravel.

An air of desperation has replaced the earlier air of confidence. Not much now remains hrthe Carter camp of high principle or simple decency. Our president has lost his cool. How else is one to explain the series of wild charges and extravagant boasts by Mr. Carter and his aides? Only a desperate candidate could have delivered himself of the president's ---hysterical appeal at a rally here at the Palmer House last week.

"You'll determine whether or not this America will be unified," Mr. Carter said. Then he posed the alternative: "Or, if I lose this election, whether America might -be separated black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban." That -alternative, he added, is "too bleak to contemplate." Apres moi, le deluge! who in the world does Jimmy Carter think he is? And what does this tell us about the president's contemptuous view of the intelligence of the American people? "If I lose this election," indeed! Are we to understand that without his healing ministry from the White House, the republic may into race riots, religious jihads, civil war and domestic rebellion? This is the language, may we assume, of a lit Statesman who would produce a. "unified If his Chicago demagoguery were an isolated slip from the rules of fair campaigning, doubtless it could be forgiveni Politics is a Foreign Policy? There now are reports the Soviet Union may be playing both ends from the middle in the Iranian-Iraqi war. According to the reports, stockpUesin South and Ethiopia are being sent to Iraq, while at the sameJjmeSpyiet puppets In Libya and Syria are airlifting supplies to Iran.

It seems only the Soviets are capable of such foreign olicy feats that they can resupply both sides in a war and have those two sides manager, secretary of state Edmund Muskie. Ever since he got the job, Muskie's unhappinesses have been oozing and seeping out, oblique plaints against the boss and against the boss confidant, national security adviser Zbigniew Brezezinskt. Muskie is letting it be known that, instead of coordinating policy as he is supposed to, his rival Brzezinski is making it. Since sinking into Foggy Bottom, fresh from a long and successful career in the Senate, the secretary of state has looked like a man cut out of the1 important decision making, a guy over in an office a umosine ride away from the White House when Zbiggy gets to eat breakfast with Gentle Jim every morning Conversely, the Carter critique is that "Raygun" is a cowboy whose six-shooter has a hair trigger. There are.enough good Reagan quotes in the files to back that up, but hovdoes the picture of the presidj stnd up as the deliberative statesman of slow counsel? cr- Every major foreign affairs -figure in the administration known to be against basing policy on military belligerance is out.

Cyrus Vance is gone, likewise Andy Young, Hodding Carter and Paul Warnke. the new secretary of state, whatever his opinions, has let it be known he has no decisive voice, so we are left with the Zbig 68 thepersoit the president harkens to in international relations. Will you sleep better with him in there than with Reagan's people? Brzezinski has long spooked those who worry about the Trilateral Commission, that Rockefeller inspired group of globally minded big shots from the major industrial powers. For countless Americans of both a rightward and a leftward persuasion this outfit, which tries to influence governments' trade and diplomatic policies, the commission is a worrisome -conspiracy. Conspiracy, of course, is one of those words which causes controversy with its mere utterance.

One man's conspiracy is the next man's laudable cooperative endeavor, but, blameless or not, the Trilateral Commission makes so many backbones knock and thighbones clink it is the Halloween of our politics and to have made Zbiggy, its former executive director, his number one foreign policy person is to have gratuitously -created mistrust and suspicion. The Zbig's reputation for getting off fast shots is easily the equal of Reagan's. He's the character who discovered the arrival of the Russian brigade in Cuba, the one it turned out had been there since John Kennedy's time. If Ronald Reagan has the wrong emotional make-up for access to any button more dangerous to push than an elevator button, what about the Polish Kissinger? Stories circulate In Washington that Brzezinski's jealousy of Dr. K's distinction is so uncontrolled it warps his judgment.

Here is Richard Falk, a professor international law at Princeton, describing The Zbig in a moment of sober prudence: "I recall one revealing incident a year or so before Brzezinski went to a social Interlude at an editorial board meeting of Foreign Policy, Warren Menschel, host and publisher handed Brzezinski a grotesque mask of Kissinger. Brzezinsk immediately put it on and started laughing compulsively. He became quite hysterical and subsided only when the mask was removed a minute or two later. It was one of those surreal happenings that reveal more than a hundred learned discourses." Or there are the recollections of a William Sullivan, the last American ambassador to Iran, who accuses Zbiggy of sabotaging the State Department in the middle of the revolution's critical muddle: "By November 1978 Brzezinski began to make his own policy and establish his own embassy in Iran." By Sullivan's account 1 Zbiggy's ambassador was a man with a reputation as a jetset playboy, a perfect Persian airhead. Sullivan accuses Brzezinski of a variety of acts all leading to a worsening of Iranian-American relations.

They range from giving newspapers secret material to further his Washington power plots to trying to foment an idiotic "military coup" against Khomeini in the very hour of the Ayatollah's victory. If the old man thinks we're against him, The Zbig gave him the evidence. Then after having so richly contributed to the making of the hostage situation, Zbigniew tried to" mend it by going sublimely ridiculous on us. He enlisted that amiable, rural, retired tosspot, Billy Carter, in the famously clownish Libyan rescue mission. As it says in the good book: Point not to the bats in thy opponents' belfry whenst thou canst hear a certain fluttering in thine own.

Another Expensive Boondoggle railroads in the country. It doesn't seem to stretch credulity too much to wonder if there isn't a relationship in there somewhere. While Hooper points to a Claimed $35 million" in track improvements the past summer, he neglects to explain why there are 14,856 defects tracks, an average of more than three per mile. The is a valued corporate citizen of Tennessee. It has a long history of service to the state and was in many ways responsible for bringing prosperity to Tennessee.

But TjastBervlceTand 7" present economic difficulty is no excuse for operations that are dangerous to citizens of the state. The 14,856 defects on tracks include such things as missing track spikes, overly worn crossties, improperly aligned and worn rails and eroded track beds: Those are defects which can cost lives. has a responsibility to spend more of its profits in repair of its lines. accusing the United States of being the bad guy in the whole affair. One wonders what Foggy Bottom is doing while these brilliant exercises in duplicity are occupying the Soviets.

If the past is any guide, we're probaby providing the necessary transport equipment to get the job done with Soviet markings conveniently stenciled over ours. There are disadvantages to trying to be unilaterally moral in foreign amounts of metal that could be recovered and recycled," according to Barry Hunter, president of the "With a backlog of more than 700 million tons, we have enough obsolete scrap right now to meet the needs of steel mills and foundries both in the United States and abroad for decades," Hunter 4 However, the problem, according to the foundation, is that current environmental cut energy policies i apparently discourage the-use of scrap metal. Hunter. said he is "seriously concerned" about the continuing rise in the scrap metal inventory, and urged that government energy -policies be reexamined to allow greater scrap use. Not to do so, he said, is "unsound both economically and While a certain allowance must be made for Mr.

Hunter's pecuniary interest in the subject, he does seem to have a valid point. We are drowning in a sea of scrap metal while the cost of raw materials ever climbs. Government policies that serve to perpetuate that situation are like so many others that need to be reexamined under the bright glare of a little common sense. Wcasfed Resource? local property owners would be crushed by new tax burdens. The i White House helpfully spelled out these awful specters-a tax increase ol $87Q Jorthe.typical Wisconsin family, a jump of $749 for the Illinois family.

This is balderdash worse than balderdash. It reflects the panic of a man so obsessed with "if I lose thise election" that he has jettisoned those characteristics for' which he once was so widely admired.t There-is much more. The Carter campaign has developed the sour taste of an acid stomach. Instead of defending the Carter record, the president has set out simply to demolish his Republican opponent by half truths, whole lies and plain Thus Mr. Reagan, ft is supposed, may be made to appear a saber-rattling warmonger who slavers to lead us into nuclear war.

Mr. Reagan, in this caricature, "has said he wants to get rid of all federal educational Mr. Reagan is a racist: sowing hatred. Mr. Reagan wants i presidency because Mr.

Carter has appointed blacks to the federal i bench. Mr. Reagan would destroy Social Security, promote inflation, oppress minorities, and so on, and so on. All this, "if I lose this election." Upon what meat does; this our Caesar feed that he has grown so Mr. Carter has had moments in which he looked big in defending human rights, in achieving the Camp David accords; in seeking to reduce the burden of federal regulations.

But in his tarbrush campaign, sad to say, he 1 has never looked so small. highway system. Some have turned4 out pretty well. Those "energy attenuators" installed around barriers between exit ramps and the main roadway have rendered reasonably safe what may- 1 otherwise have been fatal or gave personal injury They are.simply plastic barrels-filled with a soft material to 1 absorb the energy, or inertia, of the vehicle, bringing it to a stop short i of the hard barrier. A lot of experimentation went into the super highways because engineers in this country had only limited experience in construction of that type.

Interchanges in some Lt cases where put so close that -entering and leaving traffic had to cross through each other, a hair- raising experience, when you're going 45 or 50 mph and trying to" gain or lose speed. One of the ultimate blunders was the famous "malfunction junction" in congested Knoxville where Interstate 75 and Interstate 40 joined. It had a hair-pin turn impossible to negotiate at more than 15 mph and even that was breath-taking. Now that's being corrected with a massive rebuilding program aimed at getting the Expo world's fair i crowds into and out of Knoxville -i two years hence. Tv 4 Other major metropolitan areas' are plagued with now antiquated 1 sections of Interstates, some more I dangerous than others.

Money from the highway trust fund now is being provided to correct these conditions--and make the super roads safer. Cerry's World "Oh, dear! Edgar stomped on thai poor woolly, bear caterpillar. I guess thai means we re In tori a hard winter!" i body-contact sport, and an occasional roughing of the quarterback is part of the game. But Mr. Carter's apocalyptic vision -tf the ruin that would follow "if I lpsethis elecUqn'lis entirely typical of the emerging pattern of ms snnii campaign.

Earlier in the day, for another example, the president was in Milwaukee. There he sought to terrify the voters with a breathtaking distortion of Ronald Reagan's position on the administration of education and public Reagan's position a position at least as old as the Eisenhower presidency is that responsibility for these -programs should be returned to the states and localities. But the essence of Mr. Reagan's" proposal is that tax sources simultaneously be returned from the national government to the localities. The proposal may fairly be criticized as idealistic, or merely theoretical, or politically impossible, but at least in the rri conservative view there is nothing inherenUy wrong with it.

Indeed, this was how we education and welfare for 156 years' before we began to drown in floods I of federal aid. If the Reagan plan were adoptedj Mr. Carter cried, abandoning any pretense of intellectual honesty, Fred Travis; situated and offered to put in new ones elsewhere if the state would promise to enforce its tailgating -law. That got back to dealing with Chief Casey, and he wasn't yet displaying the least enthusiasm about risking the life and limb of his traffic officers out there. State safety Commissioner Gene Roberts and his highway patrol were as -cool as the Nashville police chief.

So when the monitor was turned back on in August 1978 the warning lights were left off. Miss Pickens reported the device then was used to collect "data pertaining to the number of vehicles in each lane and the spacing between "It didn't just flash lights," she -added. That continued until July of this year when the whole machine was abandoned as useless One reason it had become so was that the highway had been widened to four lanes instead of three, a step made necessary in part because environmentalists continued their successful campaign-rso far to stall completion of Interstate 440, which would have permitted some traffic to by-pass the congested area. "The project is currently on hold," the" transportation department spokeswoman said, but she Indicated its revival is unlikely. All that remains are the posts holding up the lights.

Sooner or later a motorist will demolish one of those, dropping the light bar onto the roadway and causing a half dozen or more rear-end collisions. 5 Fortunately, the bureaucrats only installed one of these things. Whether one would have worked better in another site will never be known. Perhaps some electronic wizard one day will come up with a i "following too closely monitor" which warns the driver with flashing lights, records his license number, runs it through a computer which prints out a traffic citation and addresses it. All that will be needed then is the identity of the driver so he can be hauled into court and made to pay for his misdeed.

This isn't the only experimental project carried out on the interstate According the Metal Scrap Research and Education Foundation an" outfit with an obvious old rusty axe to grind there now are more than 700 million tons of scrap iron and steel cluttering the United States. This scrap includes abandoned automobiles, old refrigerators, auto parts and 15 other major product categories analyzed in the a "scrap study" conducted by the foundationAutomobiles and automotive parts constituted the largest single source of scrap, accounting for 39 percent of total recoverable obsolete scrap last year. Everyone, of course, knows that there is a lot of junk along American highways, primarily junked automobiles. But despite the -current popularity of recycling schemes, we aren't making much use of all that iron and steel. According to the foundation, in 1979, the scrap metal industry recovered about 35 million tons of obsolete scrap.

But that wasn't enough to even stay even. Even with the 35 million tons removed, the available scrap increased from 672.2 million tons counted in 1977. "Once more it has been determined that our nation is literally wasting vast Will Rogers Says Another noble experiment by government bureaucrats has gone down the drain, though state -transportation department experts claim "residual: benefits" remain. The chief one seems to be they now know that a "following too closely monitor! won'twork, or at least not where this one was installed. It was put in place in November 1977 at a cost of $100,000, of which 90 percent came from the federal highway trust fund.

Its objective was to warn motorists with blaring horn and flashing lights that they were following too closely for the speed at which they were traveling. This, -it was thought, would cut down on -rear-end collisions on a stretch of Interstates 40 and 24 leading into Nashville from the First motorists complained about being scared out of their wits by the horn, so it was turned off. What remained was a bar of lights reading "following too close'! over each of the three lanes of traffic. -They flashed on whenever one motorist was tailgating another at 50 mph or faster and maybe slower in some instances. The State Transportation Department, in cooperation with the Safety Department, began '-collecting figures on the number of rear-end accidents in the area.

any appreciable reduction -occurred, the twd agencies haven't found out about it. Someone asked Nashville, police chief Joe Casey why his traffic officers weren't out there enforcing the law against following too -closely. "Are you crazy?" was the tenor of his answer. "You put a traffic officer out there he wouldn't last as long as a paper shirt in a bull fight. No way can you motorists and issue citations in that heavy traffic." He need not have worried.

After a nine-month period of perfect operation, the system began "acting up," Renae Pickens, the transportation department's pretty spokeswoman, reported. "We cut the thing off and tried to get the company to make repairs and ended up making some ourselves." Evidently the sensors checking motor vehicles for speed and distance apart were damaged by heavy trucks, she said, leading to the conclusion by Traffic Safety Systems Inc. or Richmond, the manufacturer, that the devices hadn't been installed properly or hadn't been put in the right place. The company refused to replace the sensors where they were then "The locusts that I saw swarming in the Argentine are houseflies compared to the destrucUon by a Presidential election. The candidates are 'high-typed gentlemen' til the contest gets close, then the 1311116' comes out.

What starts out to be a nice fight, winds up In a street brawl. "But it all comes under the heading of Democracy, and as bad as it is, it's the best scheme we can think of, with oeople going nutty for three months every four years." November 13, 1932 i 1.