EDITORIALS: Bunking Hill

LITTLE ROCK — “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.” -Joe Walsh YOU PROBABLY know people who aren’t happy unless they’re complaining. They’re the sort who’d complain that the twenty they just found in a coat pocket wasn’t a fifty. Pay them a compliment (“I like the paint job you did on the kitchen”) and they’ll find something wrong about it (“It took me a week and I don’t like the color”).

Mama always said to hold your bellyaching to a minimum. Nobody listens to a whiner. At least, nobody pays attention after a while. But complain rarely, and people are more apt to listen when you do.

Which brings us to the continuing tale of another one of those outfits with a name that goes on forever: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or, more simply, just CREW. Whew. That’s so much easier to say when dismissing its latest whine.

CREW is the kind of outfit that demands the president boycott the National Prayer Breakfast. It produces an annual Worst Governor List. (My, look at all the Rs behind the names.) Big surprise, dispatches routinely call it a left-leaning group.

Maybe because the news has been a little slow lately, CREW turned up in the papers again. This time for complaining about congressmen who sleep in their Washington, D.C., offices.

No, really.

At least 33 congressmen, including Arkansas’ own Tim Griffin, risk violating House ethics rules and-get this-federal tax law by bunking in their offices. Or so CREW has ruled.

“Offices are supposed to be for minimal personal use, and it’s no longer minimal when you’re using it as your house,” complained Melanie Sloan, CREW’s complainer-in-chief. Maybe this warm front melting the snow all across the South will hit Washington, D.C., too. That way, the folks in the CREW office near the White House can get out more. Fresh air does a body wonders.

Congressmen not only save money by living in their offices, but make a good thing of it politically, too. Most folks know these living arrangements are about politics. What congressman doesn’t like to brag to the home folks about how frugal he is? And how much money he saves by sacrificing so? And how if he can sleep on a cot in his office, then, dadgummit, the government should be able to cut down, too. And I will demand the same of those who write the federal budget (wait for applause). Here in Arkansas, it may have been Jay Dickey, aka Crazy Jay, who began this fad. There was always something a little sleep-deprived about his syntax, but we doubt if bedding down in his office was the cause. If that’s what he wanted to do, it struck us as nobody’s business but his own.

But the folks at CREW are having none of it. The group has called for . . . an investigation! In a letter to the Office of Congressional Ethics, its ever-viglilant Mrs. Sloan wrote that members whosleep in their offices are breaking rules. Because, you see, offices are meant for official use only. Also, members who sleep in their offices are receiving a taxable fringe benefit. And staffers might feel uncomfortable seeing the boss in his stocking feet without a tie at 6 in the morning.

Come on, spring. You can’t get here soon enough. These people have come down with a severe case of cabin fever. We can’t think of any other reason they’d make a federal case out of sleeping in the office.

Say . . . . Wasn’t this CREW crowd the same one that wanted another congressman from Arkansas, Mike Ross, investigated on charges of bribery and fraud-and maybe double parking and cheating at craps, for all we know-because he sold his drug store in Nevada County? Sure enough, it is! We knew we recognized the name.

Of course nothing came of those accusations against the Hon. and honorable Mike Ross, mainly because there was nothing to them to begin with. If CREW ever apologized for that caper, we missed it. All we know is that for an outfit with Ethics in its name, it might try to develop some just plain small-e ethics, too. Beginning with not bearing false witness.

OF ALL the things to fight about in Washington . . . . You got your wars, your $14-trillion (and mounting) deficit, your Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs, your illegal immigration, your Washington Redskins and your Donald-Trump-is-running-forpresident-please-Lord-no. And CREW wants to fight the battle of the cots?

Consider this a memo to all the sobersides at CREW: Don’t be silly. Folks don’t take you seriously when you’re silly.

A quick look at CREW’s website shows it to be a serious group on occasion. It issues a lot of press releases about the Freedom of Information Act. It demands investigations of Wall Street and possible market manipulations. Any outfit that makes so much noise about ethics runs the risk of sounding like . . . a good editorial page. Be still, our inky hearts. But beware: An outfit that feels it has to make a scandal out of anything and everything that comes its way may succeed only in exposing itself. Like reminding folks of those accusations against Mike Ross that turned out to be just a bunch of indignant hot air.

Also this: If the only time folks see your organization in the paper is when you’re complaining about frugal congressmen, that’ll make them roll their eyes the next time they see you in the headlines. Think PETA. Even when that crew says something that makes a bit of sense, few folks pay attention. Isn’t that the group that wants to ban bass fishing? Pick your battles.

Another lesson CREW could learn?

Let sleeping congressmen lie. Look at it this way: When they’re prone on a couch or a cot in their offices, they’re not voting on legislation. All things considered, that’s a benefit that CREW-and the rest of us-might ought to applaud, not condemn.