Why are some Americans, including some of our neighbors in the poor counties of the southern Missouri Ozarks, seemingly so ready to believe in wild conspiracy theories about the United Nations and plans to confiscate their lands to set up a world government? Why do so many Americans fear their government, especially so in the wake of the disasters and dozens of corpses at Waco, Tx. in 1993 and at Ruby Ridge, Idaho the year before? How does a twisted, warped misfit such as Timothy McVeigh get to the point where he ends up murdering 168 innocent people? The answers are many and varied, but journalist Joseph Farah surely has a piece of the answer. Writing in the LosAngeles Times, Farah says:"In the past couple of years, we have witnessed the biggest arms buildup in the history of the federal government. I don't mean the defense department; that would actually be constitutional and might even make sense."No. The kind of arms that are proliferating in Washington these days are the kind pointed at our own civilian population and carried by a growing number of federal police forceswith ever-larger budgets and ever-deadlier arsenals. It's the militarization of the federal government. In 1996 alone, at least 2,349 new federal cops were authorized to carry firearms, according to the General Accounting Office. As a result of that record one-year surge, there are nearly 60,000 armed federal agents representing departments as diverse as the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Postal Service."The EPA? I suspect that most Americans would be shocked to learn that agents of the EPA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers are packing heat. Has the protection of spotted owls and kangaroo rats become a matter of life and death? Why do EPA agents need to be armed? ... Is it wise policy? Is it in the spirit of the Constitution? Where do we draw the line?"

* * * * * * *

DO SEA TURTLES HAVE MORE RIGHTS THAN BABIES?Speaking of spotted owls, kangaroo rats and the like, and therelative status of their rights vis-a-vis those of human beings.

With the historic veto override confrontation looming on my partial-birth abortion bill Sept. 10, the following letter to the editor from the Kansas City Star this week caught my eye:"Early this summer on a trip to Florida, we learned that driving is restricted on many beaches along Florida's east coast in order to protect sea turtles and their eggs. Under the Endangered Species Act a person can be fined up to $25,000 for unintentionally killing a sea turtle or damaging a nest. This fine can reach up to $50,000 for an intentional violation."I think it is interesting that developing sea turtles inside their eggs are offered more protection than developing human babies inside their mothers' wombs. If the logic of the abortion lobby were used regarding turtle eggs, we would be told the contents of the eggs were nothing more than `blobs of tissue.'"Any reasonable person knows that a turtle egg left undisturbed will continue to develop until it hatches and crawls to the ocean. Isn't it obvious that the baby in utero is completely human, needing only time to develop just as the sea turtle does?"

**********

WITNESS TAMPERING, MORE INDICTMENTS?Here's an underreported story given prominent play in TheWashington Times, but not many more media outlets. Arkansas trooperL.D. Brown has told Whitewater Special Prosecutor Ken Starr about an attempted bribe offered him at 2 a.m. June 16 while he was on board a bus to London's Heathrow Airport. Brown will reportedly testify that a man approached him at that hour on a public bus near Leicester, England and offered him $100,000 and a job to influence his testimony before the Whitewater grand jury. Mr. Brown was told his "contact" will be a person at the National Security Council, a White House agency. Reports have it that a second offer was made to Brown in a follow-up call when he returned to Little Rock. Brown is a former president of the Arkansas State Police Association who was long assigned to then-Gov. Clinton's security detail.

Ken Starr has been hiring experienced, senior-level federal prosecutors this year. You don't hire prosecutors unless you're planning prosecutions. This week's indictment (by another prosecutor, not Ken Starr) of former Clinton Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy on 39 counts of accepting illegal gratuities and bribes is a foretaste of more to come. Look for this fall to see a cascade of indictments against as many as perhaps a score of Clinton hangers-on, as we approach a day of reckoning for the administration this president promied would be held to "the highest ethical standards ever."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.