washington-dc

Excerpt from page 3 of "Wicked Washington"Shelly Williams, the main character, speaking about her life:And close and dangerous calls were almost my last name. Yet I felt as comfortable among the street hustlers, junkies, thieves, and criminals of D.C. as I did dining with mywhite-collar, college-pedigreed friends over filet mignon, Maine lobster, and strawberry cheesecake at LaMermaidSeafood Restaurant.

Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power.

At a national political convention, you have hundreds of people who consider themselves at least as important as the Secretary of Commerce. If it's a Democratic convention, you also have dozens of A-list Hollywood and music celebrities. (If it's a Republican convention, you have Bo Derek.) Also you have swarms of lower-ranking Washington minions with titles like Deputy Assistant to the Associate Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff who are trying to move up the ladder to Deputy Associate to the Assistant Acting Deputy Assistant Understudy.

I swear if Washington moved any slower, we could be at war and it would all be over before they could even lift their sluggish, naked, dead asses off of their comfortable heated-seat toilets. -Fitzhugh to Captain Jeeter

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

Funny thing about love, ain__ it? Sometimes it saves you and sometimes, like right then, even love isn__ enough.

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn__ analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.

I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists]

Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

Most of everything is very little of not very much at all.

Snowmageddon.Dirty glacial clouds hammered the city's anvil. On the District of Columbia__ northwestern edge, gusts of snow rolled across the Park Road Bridge like volcanic ash.

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.- Mark Twain

Outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

There are seemingly parallel origins of Nature__ God in America and China__ Mandate of Heaven. These twin concepts created socio-political forces for public good and orderly governance, and a unique cultural ethos (related to the Creator of the Universe in America and the Son of Heaven in China) is deeply rooted in both societies. Each concept is physically yet stealthily manifested in the architectural designs of the two capital cities, Beijing and Washington.

America acknowledged the greatness of Confucius through a trio of ancient lawgivers__oses flanked by Confucius to his right and Solon on his left__n the monument to __ustice, the Guardian of Liberty_ displayed on the eastern pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations