Forgotten what it was like when the gov't looked for competent people to do our business? Check out Stephen Barr's tribute to some "village elders"

"You may think that you've seen the worst of the hurricanes, but I assure you that you have not. We have a lot of work to do."
--legendary meteorologist Max Mayfield, at a farewell breakfast Wednesday honoring his retirement as director of the National Hurricane Center

For all the Bush administration's efforts to purge the federal government of competent people and replace them with incompetent cronies, crooks and dimwits (or--ideally--crooked, dimwitted cronies), it must be frustrating to them how many honest and earnest public servants remain on the job.

As Stephen Barr points out in his Washington Post "Federal Diary" column today, "Agencies Bid Farewell to Retiring 'Elders,'" the immediate post-holiday weeks are a traditional retirement time for senior federal employees, both because of the way their pension system works and because the holidays provide a natural pause in the work rhythm of government agencies.

"Doris Hausser, a senior policy adviser at the Office of Personnel Management used the term 'village elder' this week in an interview about her retirement," Barr writes, "and it's an apt description of many career public servants as they end their federal journeys."

Hurricane whiz Mayfield is just one of the people Barr pays tribute to--

"after 34 years as a government meteorologist. He started his career as an intern and rose through the ranks to become the government's face on television during the hurricane season. [His] last day included a farewell breakfast where he delivered, as he has for much of the past decade, an appeal for hurricane preparedness. "You may think that you've seen the worst of the hurricanes, but I assure you that you have not," he said. "We have a lot of work to do."

Of course, these "village elders" are the senior career civil servants retiring. The loss seems all the more painful when we consider the kind of people who have been pumped into the system these last six years--people who have been put in place, as Paul Krugman has suggested, precisely to prove the psycho-right-wing creed that government is incompetent.