Hail to the Chief
At the bottom of the executive, gratitude for change at the top.

By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department
January 22, 2001 11:35 a.m.

here was no inaugural revelry for Dunphy this weekend. No clinking of cocktail glasses with Lowry and Goldberg, no lighthearted exchange of bons mots with O'Beirne, and, most sadly, no celebratory swirl across the dance floor with Coulter. There were only the abbreviated views of events afforded by television between tours along some of the more unglamorous streets of Los Angeles in a conspicuously adorned Ford sedan.

Yet, despite my remoteness from the celebration, no one was more gladdened than I to see a decent and honorable man assume power from one so manifestly otherwise. For it is out on those unglamorous streets — of Los Angeles and every other city and town — that police officers stand as the nation's most visible symbol of executive power and government authority. And it is out on those streets that such lofty governing principles as the rule of law can take on life-and-death meaning.

We have now seen the passing of an administration that for eight years turned the rule of law on its head. Mr. Clinton and his adherents by turns subverted, debased, or simply ignored the laws to suit their needs at any given moment. Then, when the House Republicans had the impudence to hold the president accountable for his misdeeds, these same praetorians stood shoulder to shoulder to proclaim that it was they who were defending the rule of law and the Constitution.

These actions have consequences. The ripples of Clintonism are yet traveling to the far edge of the pond, and we can only pray that Mr. Bush can begin to avert their corrosive effects. As was so vividly demonstrated in Los Angeles a few years ago and on the national stage during the operatic throes of impeachment, the simple truth can be trumped by a clever tongue in a sharp suit, and a criminal can be embraced as a victim by people so comfortably cloaked in the mantle of their own victimhood. May Clinton's presidency one day be seen as the high-water mark for such thinking.

I do not claim to have any powers of clairvoyance, but I predict with absolute certainty that when Mr. Bush leaves office, be it four years hence or eight, it will not be under the shadow of a plea bargain. And there will be no presidential pardons for friends whose silence has kept him out of the dock. In Mr. Bush and those he has appointed to serve under him, we at long last see the ascent of men and women who acknowledge — indeed who celebrate — that our nation's Founders were men whose genius has been unsurpassed in the history of the world, and that we would do well to once again abide by their enduring instructions.

Godspeed, Mr. President. Let the repairs begin.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management .)