Derb: Maybe I’ve been infected with bureaucratitis or something, but I’m compelled to stand up for my bureaucrat neighbors. The treehouse guy does not live in the domain of mini-mansions that Peggy Noonan wrote about, which are inhabited not by federal employees but by lobbyists and related parasites. If we were to compare his neighborhood’s profile to another suburban district in a major metro area, say, Huntington, N.Y., we’d see that, while the average household incomes were similar, his neighborhood is less white, more immigrant, less well-educated, with lower housing prices, and its inhabitants less likely to be lawyers.
And he’s an Army aviation operations specialist who’s served in Iraq.