A sign of the sickness of the D.C. government is that blame and responsibility can never be attached to what's obvious. An endlessly inept and patronage-ridden District government, through two mayoral admin-is-tra-tions over 16 years, has poisoned itself with failures of misconduct and excess.

Failure has been blamed on everything - the original home rule charter, congressional Democrats and Republicans, the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations, financial manipulators and suburban residents, white conspiracies of all kinds - but rarely blamed by black leaders on successive black governments that have been in charge.Leonard Larsen

Scripps Howard News Service

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