We believe in free markets and free people." We stands for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the oppression of collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.
Balancing reconciliation with justice may be impossible. A tiny bit of either would be nice
FOR several weeks a neat former schoolteacher has sat in a Phnom Penh dock, detailing before the tribunal how meticulously he used to carry out the orders of his bosses. As a child, he said by way of clarification, he had always been “a well-disciplined boy, who respected the teachers and did good deeds”. This is Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, former commandant of Tuol Sleng, a Khmer Rouge torture-centre and prison, which 14,000 men, women and children entered but only a dozen survived. Duch has admitted blame for the horrors at Tuol Sleng. According to the New York Times, he couldn’t bear to hear the late Pol Pot claim that Tuol Sleng was a fabrication of his enemies. He thus seems certain to be the first person convicted for playing a part in Khmer Rouge atrocities from 1975-79 that killed up to 2m Cambodians.
This is not unqualified good news. Justice comes years too late. The United Nations and Cambodia haggled for a decade just over the details of the court, eventually set up in 2007. The costs have been gargantuan, though, according to its outgoing chief foreign prosecutor this week, it is still “underfunded and under-resourced”. Political meddling is high, and corruption apparently abounds. Some of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders who gave Duch his orders await trial, but they are frail and may not live long. Besides, Cambodia’s strongman leader, Hun Sen, is a former Khmer Rouge himself and may be unwilling to see too much dug up. Duch may be the first to be tried, but also the last.
Asia has plenty of killing grounds, and their story is similar. In Timor-Leste two truth-seeking commissions have looked respectively into the death of 200,000 people during Indonesia’s scorched-earth occupation after 1975, and into an orgy of arson and killing by the Indonesian army and its vigilante henchmen after East Timorese voted for independence in 1999. By coming up with a record, and by even eliciting an admission of blame by Indonesia, the reports exceeded expectation. Yet many Timorese want a proper reckoning. Reconciliation can get in the way. The reports have gathered dust. Timor-Leste’s present leaders argue that, with aid scarce, filling bellies trumps paying for tribunals.
Above all, they do not want to open old wounds. Timor-Leste’s first president, Xanana Gusmão, who like Nelson Mandela was a former prisoner of the old regime, also followed Mr Mandela in calling for forgiveness. His successor, José Ramos-Horta, has since pardoned the very few men to have been imprisoned for the 1999 violence. A culture of amnesty prevails. There is little evidence that it has helped stability. On the contrary, Timor-Leste has seen gang warfare, a mutiny by part of the army and an assassination attempt on Mr Ramos-Horta.
Political leaders’ wish to sweep the past under the rug is such an Asian habit that suspicions are aroused when a government seems too keen to try the opposite. Take Bangladesh. The Awami League under Sheikh Hasina wants to try 50 Bangladeshis for atrocities in the 1971 war of secession, in which perhaps 3m died. The suspects include nearly the entire current leadership of Jamaat-e-Islami, the biggest Islamic party and a former coalition partner of Sheikh Hasina’s nemesis, Khaleda Zia. Jamaat-e-Islami’s youth wing, in league with the West Pakistani army, specialised in killing intellectuals. Still, Sheikh Hasina’s nakedly political motives would undermine a tribunal’s credibility abroad.
In the end the international response makes, or more usually breaks, the search for justice, which almost always needs foreign support. Who, for instance, pays for reparations? In Cambodia it will not be the doddery former Khmer leaders. In Timor-Leste it was suggested that those who sold arms to the Indonesian army should stump up a share. And pigs may fly. As tribunal costs (and failures) mount, the United Nations and rich-world donors tend to slough off responsibility.
More than that, the process of justice and reconciliation is usually hostage to hard-nosed geopolitics. In private, diplomats from China, staunch ally of the Khmer Rouge and still Cambodia’s chief patron today, put down the tribunal’s aims. It is easy to forget how the United States also backed the Khmers Rouges as victims of Vietnamese expansionism. Support for the Indonesian army during the cold war meant that America overlooked atrocities in East Timor. That had changed by 1999. But after September 11th Indonesia, the scourge of East Timor, became a chief ally in the war against terror. A newly democratic Indonesia is hardly to blame for its army’s past. Besides, many Indonesians were themselves victims of state-backed violence during the Suharto era.
Might is right
Similarly, hard-nosed geopolitics bodes ill for any accounting in Sri Lanka, now that the Sri Lankan army has defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, with both sides accused of war crimes. For the process to start now is out of the question. Domestic critics of the army’s conduct fear for their lives as “traitors”. But the response of the UN Security Council was dismal during this year’s military endgame, in which tens of thousands of civilians were trapped. Though the UN agrees that “timely and decisive” action should be taken when governments fail to protect their own people, lobbying for pressure on Sri Lanka by the West was mild, and cynical opposition to council action by China and Russia, two chief sellers of arms to Sri Lanka, was vigorous.
As for China itself, Banyan lived a decade ago in a Beijing compound whose backdoor guard, a soft-spoken bourgeois type, had not exchanged a word with the frontdoor guard, his tormentor during the Cultural Revolution, since the last ghastly struggle session in 1969. The era remains nearly off-limits for public debate, and the only reckoning was the show-trial of the Gang of Four in 1981. In that light, any attempt at a first draft of historical honesty, as in Cambodia or East Timor, looks far better than nothing.
Obama was right to resist reopening the torture debate.
By PEGGY NOONAN
What makes it hard at the moment to write sympathetically of Barack Obama is the loud chorus of approbation arising from his supporters in journalism as they mark the hundred days. Drudge calls it the "Best President Ever" campaign. It is marked by an abandonment of critical thinking among otherwise thoughtful men and women who comprise, roughly speaking, the grown-ups of journalism, the old hands of the MSM who have been through many presidents and should know better. They are insisting too much. If they were utterly confident, they wouldn't be.
In the area of foreign affairs, one of the arguments for candidate Barack Obama was that he would put a new stamp—new ways, new style and content—on America's approach to the world. This might allow some in the world—occasional allies, foes, irritated sympathizers—to recalibrate and make positive readjustments in their attitude toward Washington. With George W. Bush, everyone got dug in, and the ground froze. After 9/11 he cut like a sword and divided: You were with us or against us. He launched a war that angered major allies. For seven years there was constant agitation, and the world was allowed to make a caricature of U.S. leadership. There was no capture of Osama bin Laden, the man who made 9/11 and whose seizure would have provided a unifying Western rallying point and inspired instructive admiration: Those Yanks get their man.
A second foreign-affairs argument for Obama is that we had entered the age of weapons of mass destruction (we'd entered it before 9/11, but only after that date did everyone know) under solely Republican rule. Which allowed anyone who wanted to, to perceive it, or play it, as a Republican war, a Republican drama. There were potential benefits in a change in leadership, one being that the Democrats would now share authority and responsibility for the age and its difficulties. They'd get the daily raw threat file, they'd apply their view of the world and do their best. A primary virtue of that: On the day something bad happened—and that day will come, and no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community will tell you otherwise—we would as a nation be spared, as we got through it, the added burden of the terrible, cleaving, partisan divisiveness of 2000-08. This would help hold us together in a hard time.
Is Mr. Obama putting a new style and approach on the age? Yes. On the occasion of the hundred days one can say: So far, so good. (We are limiting this discussion to foreign policy because in terms of domestic policy there are only so many ways to say "Oy.") There is an air of moderation, a temperate approach. Mr. Obama shakes hands with everyone, as is appropriate, for if American presidents dined only with leaders of high moral caliber and democratic disposition, they'd often sit alone at the table of nations. Though the controversy was that Mr. Obama shook Hugo Chavez's hand at the summit last week, the news was the desperation with which Mr. Chavez tried to get in the picture with him. It's not terrible when they want to be in the picture with you. It all depends on what you do with the proximity and in the ensuing conversation.
But now a hard issue has arisen, and it may well have bad foreign-policy implications.
Mr. Obama has had great and understandable difficulty in balancing competing claims regarding how to treat government information on prisoner abuse. The White House debated, decided to release Bush-era memos, then said they wouldn't allow anyone to be prosecuted, then said maybe they would. It was flat-footed, confusing. The only impressive Obama we saw on the question this week was the one described by "a senior White House official" in the Washington Post. He or she was quoted saying, of the internal administration debates, that "the president's concern was that would ratchet the whole thing up," and "His whole thing is: I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don't need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and relitigate this."
Assuming the official spoke accurately of Mr. Obama's attitude, the president was wise in his reservations.
A problem with the release of the documents is that it opens the way—it probably forces the way—to congressional hearings, or a commission, or an independent prosecutor. It is hard at this point to imagine that what will follow will not prove destructive to—old-fashioned phrase coming—the good of the country.
Torture is bad, and as to whether the procedures outlined in the memos constituted torture, you could do worse than follow the wisdom of John McCain, who says, "Waterboarding is torture, period." This is something he'd know about. Abuse is wrong not only in a specific and immediate sense but in a larger one: It coarsens and damages the nation that does it while undermining its reputation in the world and its trust in itself. I freely admit it is easy to say this on a pretty day in spring 2009, and might not have been when 3,000 Americans had just been killed. In New York it took months for us to lose the terrible, burnt-plastic smell of the smoke. The earliest memos were written by men who still had the smell of smoke in their noses.
Why have reservations, then, about release of the memos and the investigations that will no doubt follow?
For these reasons. Prisoner abuse has been banned. Mr. Obama himself, as he notes in the quote above, banned it. It's over. The press, with great difficulty, and if arguably belatedly, did and is doing its job: It uncovered and revealed the abuse. The historians are descending, as they should. Hearings, commissions or prosecutors would suck all the oxygen out of the room and come to obsess the capital, taking focus off two actual, immediate and pressing emergencies, the economy and the age of terror. Hearings, especially, would likely tear up the country as we descended into opposing camps. They would damage or burden America's intelligence services, and likely result in the abuse of those who acted from high motives, having been advised their actions were legal. As for the memo writers, some of whose constitutional theories were apparently tilted to the extreme in favor of the executive, it is hard to see how it would help future administrations, or this one, to have such advice, however incorrectly formulated, criminalized.
Finally, hearings would not take place only in America. They would take place in the world, in this world, the one with extremists and terrible weapons. It is hard to believe hearings, with grandstanding senators playing to the crowd, would not descend into an auto-da-fé, a public burning of sinners, with charges, countercharges, leaks and graphic testimony. This would be a self-immolating exercise that would both excite and inform America's foes. And possibly inspire them.
Meanwhile, a resurgent Taliban is moving toward Islamabad and, possibly, the Pakistani nuclear arsenal; Israel and Iran are at loggerheads; and Iraq and Afghanistan continue as live and difficult wars. And that's just one small part of the world.
What a time to open a new front, and have a new fight, and not about what is but what was.
Hard not to believe it wouldn't be better to leave this one to history, and the historians. Absent that, a commission is better than a public prosecutor with an endless prosecution, and a public prosecutor is better than congressional hearings. Really, almost anything would be better than that.
WASHINGTON -- Rampant redistribution of wealth by government is now the norm. So is this: It inflames government's natural rapaciousness and subverts the rule of law. This degeneration of governance is illustrated by the Illinois Legislature's transfer of income from some disfavored riverboat casinos to racetracks.
Illinois has nine licensed riverboat casinos and five horse-racing tracks. In 2006, supposedly to "address the negative impact that riverboat gaming has had" on Illinois horse racing, the Legislature -- racing interests made huge contributions to Gov. Rod Blagojevich -- mandated a transfer of 3 percent of the gross receipts of the four most profitable casinos, those in the Chicago area, to the state's horse-racing tracks. This levy, subsequently extended to run until 2011, will confiscate substantially more than $100 million.
What is to prevent legislators from taking revenues from Wal-Mart and giving them to local retailers? Or from chain drugstores to local pharmacies? Not the tattered remnant of the Constitution's takings clause.
The Fifth Amendment says private property shall not "be taken for public use without just compensation" (emphasis added). Fifty state constitutions also stipulate taking only for public uses. But the Illinois Supreme Court ignored the public use question. Instead, the court said it is "well settled" that the takings clause applies only to government's exercise of its eminent domain power regarding land, buildings and other tangible or intellectual property -- but not money.
Conflicting rulings by state courts demonstrate that that question is chaotically unsettled. That is one reason the U.S. Supreme Court should take the Illinois case and reject the preposterous idea that money is not property within the scope of the takings clause -- an idea that licenses legislative confiscations. Another and related reason why the court should take the case is to reconsider its 2005 ruling that rendered the "public purpose" requirement empty.
The careful crafters of the Bill of Rights intended the adjective "public" to restrict government takings to uses directly owned by government or primarily serving the general public, such as roads, bridges or public buildings. In 1954, in a case arising from a disease-ridden section of Washington, D.C., the court broadened the "public use" criterion. It declared constitutional takings for the purpose of combating "blight" that is harmful to the larger community.
In 2005, however, in a 5-4 decision, the court radically attenuated the "public use" restriction on takings, saying that promoting "economic development" is a sufficient public use. The court upheld the New London, Conn., city government's decision to seize an unblighted middle-class neighborhood for the purpose of turning the land over to private businesses which, being wealthier than the previous owners, would be a richer source of tax revenues. So now government takings need have only some anticipated public benefit, however indirect and derivative, at the end of some chain of causation hypothesized by the government doing the taking and benefiting from it.
In a brief opposing the Illinois Legislature, the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of state legislators, makes this argument against "predatory taxation": Suppose Congress, eager to aid newspapers hurt by competition from new information technologies, decides to take a percentage of the assets of Bill Gates and half a dozen other beneficiaries of those technologies, and give the money to newspapers. Would not this "take and transfer" scheme be unconstitutional? Targeting specific, identifiable persons or entities for unfavorable treatment, and transferring their assets to equally identifiable persons or entities, surely also raises equal protection issues.
Unquestionably a legislature can impose a levy on casinos if the revenues become subject to what the state legislators' brief calls "allocation via the familiar push and pull of political decision-making." But Illinois' confiscation of riverboat revenues is a private-pockets-to-private-pockets transfer, without even laundering the money through the state treasury.
The Supreme Court has held that "one person's property may not be taken for the benefit of another private person without a justifying public purpose." But in the aftermath of the court's ruling in the New London case, the Illinois Legislature merely seeks judicial deference toward its judgment that transferring wealth from casinos to racetracks serves the public purpose of benefiting "farmers, breeders, and fans of horse racing."
The court's virtual nullification of the "public use" requirement encourages lawlessness, which will proliferate until the court enunciates the constitutional principle that the takings clause protects money, like other forms of property, against egregious seizures. Enunciating such a principle would be a step toward restoring meaning to the "public purpose" clause.
The greatest man I will ever know: My father, L. Richard Grigg, holding his grandson, Jefferson Leonidas Grigg (age 3 at the time), circa 2004.
At some point in each visit we pay to my parents' home I find myself pondering a curious object found in their washroom – a small glass cologne dispenser in the shape of a mallard.
The artifact entered my childhood home as a Nixon-era Christmas present to my father, and has survived no fewer than a dozen migrations across three states. The aromatic toiletry dispensed from it has a pleasant if generic scent vaguely reminiscent of Hai Karate (a 1960s-era cheapie cologne that was marketed as an Axe-style olfactory aphrodisiac). To this day the decanter appears to be a little less than half full.
The sight of that insipid little cologne bottle has an effect on me akin to that described by the protagonist from Remembrance of Things Past as he consumes his first morsel of tea-soaked Madeleine cake. I find myself irresistibly transported back to my childhood in a home presided over by loving, thrifty parents whose formative years were indelibly marked by the experiences of the (last) Great Depression.
Like tens of millions of Americans, my mother and father lived by the Depression-era credo, "Use it up, wear it out; make it do, or do without." They would never buy something new – an appliance, an article of clothing, an automobile, or a piece of farm equipment – when it was possible to extend the lifespan of a suitable item already in our possession.
My parents, like many others of their generation, preferred saving to spending, and self-reliant home production to the typical consumer lifestyle.
We always had a garden, albeit sometimes a very small one, in order to grow our own produce, which was always much better than what we could buy at a grocery store. Mother always canned whatever we harvested; she also baked bread (often from grain we grew ourselves), churned butter (from a cow I often milked by hand), and kept our old clothes in good repair. Dad would only throw something away if he couldn't devise some suitable use for it, and he constantly surprised me by the depth and variety of his imagination.
During the early 1970s, after Nixon definitively de-coupled the dollar from gold and our economy was plunged into a recession, Mom and Dad began to stock up on survival foods of various kinds.
In keeping with the prime directive of food storage – "store what you eat, and eat what you store" – our family soon became acquainted with the odd but hardly unpleasant flavor of storable surrogates for more familiar staples, such as carob powder as a replacement for cocoa, and textured vegetable protein (TVP) as a substitute for sausage on pizza.
In 1979, as Carter-era stagflation plagued the national economy, our family relocated from eastern Oregon to southwestern Idaho. Shortly before our move, my father – a real estate broker – consummated a sale in which the closing costs were paid, in part, by a large quantity of silver in the form of bars as large as 100 ounces apiece.
After we re-settled in Madison County, Dad put the silver in safe storage and tried to establish himself in the local real estate market.
Unfortunately, we arrived just as a reconstruction "boom" went bust.
In June 1976, Idaho's Teton Dam failed, resulting in a flood of nearly Katrina-esque proportions.
(Ironically, one eyewitness to the disaster was a farmer named Daryl Wayne Grigg, who is – as far as I can tell – no relation.)
The Feds spent $100 million to build the Teton Dam, which was never rebuilt. Following the flood they spent at least $300 million to settle damage claims. For more than two years after the floodwaters retreated, federal money poured into communities throughout the devastated floodplain, including Madison County. But the reconstruction boom was over by the time our family arrived, and the real estate market collapsed like a traumatized soufflé, or better yet, like a federally constructed dam.
For the five years spanning most of my time in high school and college – 1979–1984 – my Dad's real estate business, in practical terms, produced no income.
With the real estate market choked off, my Dad opened another revenue stream. He and two of my brothers, along with a rotating cast of neighbors, opened a bicycle repair shop. This was a business suited to recessionary times, in which, once again, people seek to extract as much use as they can out of what they have.
The bike repair business brought in a modest but indispensable stream of income. But what saved our family from utter destitution was Dad's silver cache.
In January 1980, about a year after our family moved to Rexburg, Idaho, silver peaked at a little more than $50 an ounce. Dad sold his entire hoard, which had appreciated by several hundred percent over its original market value, just off the peak price. That transaction provided our family with sufficient funds to survive for more than a year.
Shortly thereafter, our family became involved in a short-lived but very worthwhile alternative local economy built on the barter system.
Consumer items of various kinds – clothing, jewelry, household goods, storable foods – were pooled and then assigned credit value according to market demand; those "credits" were then withdrawn and used to purchase whatever their owner desired. It was in this way that my three younger brothers and I were provided with school clothes in the fall of 1980, and presents the following Christmas. Alas, that worthy enterprise perished after the parasitical clique calling itself the government devised a way to tax it.
During this period I was a teenager largely oblivious to the stressful challenges confronted by my parents as they tried to provide for a family of nine with no conventional means of earning a living.
My biggest preoccupations at the time involved such things as learning the guitar stylings of Michael Schenker and Frank Marino, keeping up with my self-imposed nightly football workouts (which at the time consisted of 1,200 sit-ups and about half as many push-ups), and wondering if I'd ever run into an Erin Gray look-alike.*
I had only the sketchiest idea of the genuinely heroic efforts being made by my parents not only to keep our family alive, but to make their large brood of omnivorous children happy.
Owing entirely to the thrift and industry of my parents, our family survived a severe national recession and a local depression without suffering noticeable privations of any kind. We were well-clothed, well-fed, blessed with a comfortable home and surrounded by a surprising number of amenities.
Several times since then my parents have suffered severe reversals of fortune. At one point they were forced to live without reported income in the late 1980s owing to the efforts of a corrupt tax collector (but then I repeat myself) to extort personal payoffs from them. (My father adamantly refused to reveal the identity of the despotic little cretin at the time he was making life miserable for him and my mother. "Dad, tell me who it is," I demanded. "Why do you want to know?" he asked. "It's better that I not answer that question," I replied. "Well, then, I can't tell you," he said, ending the conversation.)
Our family was immensely blessed by the Depression-era lessons learned by my parents regarding self-discipline and deferral of gratification. It's hardly surprising that people who displayed such commendable austerity would keep a bottle of cheap but serviceable cologne for nearly four decades; after all, it hasn't been used up, so why throw it out?
Obviously, my parents fit the profile of "hoarders" – people who shirk the patriotic duty to spend everything they make, leverage themselves as deeply as they can, and consume as much as possible in order to boost "aggregate demand."
In fact, people of that insular, provincial mind-set are responsible for the ongoing economic collapse, according to the bien-pensants.
The stolid refusal of hoarders to do their part is undermining the generosity of the Federal Reserve in pumping "liquidity" (that is, inflated dollars) into the economy, and the heroic efforts of Obama the Good and Wise to spend as much as he deems necessary to restore prosperity to our troubled land.
In a cover story lamenting the fact that the past year and a half has witnessed a cultural shift from profligacy to parsimony, Newsweek strikes a tone at once patronizing and accusatory in addressing those who choose to save rather than spend.
"The rush to hoard cash and pinch pennies is understandable, given that some $13 trillion in net worth evaporated between mid-2007 and the end of 2008," the story begins, and if it had been written by an honest and rational man the matter would have ended there. But the author perversely persisted, ignoring sound economic sense in favor of forcing a Keynesian homily on his long-suffering readers.
While it "makes complete microeconomic sense for families and individual businesses" to economize, that behavior "is macroeconomically troubling," Newsweek continues. "For our $14 trillion economy to recover and thrive, hoarders must open their wallets and become consumers.... [I]n our economy in which 70 percent of activity is derived from consumers, we do need our neighbors to spend. Otherwise we fall into what economist John Maynard Keynes called the `paradox of thrift.' If everyone saves during a slack period, economic activity will decrease, thus making everyone poorer."
The same rebuke is offered, in much sterner language, by the New York Times. In the midst of a paean to the Federal Reserve for conjuring into existence more than $1 trillion to buy bad debts – hundreds of billions in worthless mortgages from Fannie and Freddie, and even more to purchase Treasury bonds – the Times takes a swipe at "lenders [who are] unwilling to lend and borrowers [who are] unwilling or unable to borrow."
The Times quotes Jay Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs (aka the Shadow Treasury Department), who insists that our deepening economic collapse is entirely the fault of those narrow-minded "hoarders": "We're in a deep recession mainly because the private sector, for a variety of reasons, has decided to save a lot more." (Emphasis added.)
Now, Hatzius works for Goldman Sachs, which means that he's a bit like a mob bookkeeper, albeit much less reputable and trustworthy. Minds not terminally clotted by Keynesianism should be able to understand that Hatzius is deliberately confusing cause and effect, and maliciously blaming the victims in order to exculpate one the chief offenders in the recently ended orgy of Fed-abetted financial fraud.
The Times, a dying propaganda appendage of the Power Elite (and may its demise come quickly), would have us believe that the key to prosperity is the Fed's ability to create "vast new sums of money out of thin air" – the exact phrase it used to describe the recent "injection" of $1 trillion by the central bank into the U.S. economy – coupled with unbridled consumption by both government and the population at large.
Sounder minds understand that there is no discontinuity in the economic laws governing both "micro"- and "macro"-economies: Neither nations nor households can build prosperity through debt and consumption, but rather through thrift and productivity.
The emerging media campaign against "hoarding" has a nasty and unmistakable flavor of Stalin-variety collectivist scapegoating: The term "hoarders" was produced by the same propaganda mill that churned out official imprecations against "wreckers" and "kulaks."
Whenever a collectivist regime expands its control over an economy, it has to find somebody to blame for the inevitable dislocations, shortages, and hardships.
Typically such ruling elites re-direct blame at those whose economic behavior is rational. And scapegoating in such circumstances is inevitably a prelude to outright confiscation of wealth, and, eventually, the liquidation of those intransigently committed to individual freedom and dignity.
The Fed and its cohorts are already confiscating the earnings of "hoarders" through inflation. But as the effects of Obamanomics become tangible, and our country begins to follow the course charted by Zimbabwe, those responsible for the disaster won't be content with such an indirect assault.
Be that as it may, our only plausible hope for survival – as individuals and families, and as voluntary communities of shared interests and values – is to do exactly the opposite of what the government instructs us. And this begins with the careful study, and appropriate emulation, of the wise people who are increasingly maligned as "hoarders."
*Miss Gray, for the uninitiated, played the redoubtable Col. Wilma Deering on the late-70s fromage-festBuck Rogers in the 25th Century. She is a lovely and, by all accounts, very decent lady, but in terms of radiant beauty, comparing her to my Korrin is a bit like comparing a penlight to a supernova.
