SACRAMENTO, CA - Rep. Gary Condit, the Modesto Democrat who remains curiously agnostic about the whereabouts of one Chandra Levy, his good friend and a missing intern, has a facet that has escaped discussion. And if television viewers think they saw Rep. Condit years earlier, they might well have.

In the 1978 movie “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” Gary Condit plays a customer at a Chula Vista pizza restaurant where a brawl takes place. The film, a cult classic of sorts, was produced by Steve Peace, a Democratic assemblyman from El Cajon, in San Diego County. When Condit was an assemblyman, he teamed with Peace and three others in an unsuccessful attempt to topple speaker Willie Brown, now mayor of San Francisco.

Steve Peace, it might be recalled, is also the author of a legislative version of “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” California’s law on the deregulation of electricity. This measure deregulated only wholesale prices and played a major role in creating California’s current power crisis. While blackouts make searching more difficult, links between that crisis and the Chandra Levy disappearance have proved elusive.

Here is a bright young woman with her whole life ahead of her, and yet she vanishes without a trace, after a liaison with a congressman. On the other hand, there are people who, if they suddenly disappeared, with or without a connection to an elected representative, would not be missed.

Robert McNamara, for example, has managed to botch everything he has touched, especially Vietnam, yet is still upheld as some kind of sage and senior statesman.

Daniel Schorr, the prevailing pundit at National Public Radio, made a name for himself by being disliked by Richard Nixon, and takes care to remind listeners of that enmity. Schorr’s predictable liberal slant and sanctimoniousness would be missed only by sanctimonious liberals, that is, by NPR’s listener base. It is also a solid bet that the nation has had enough of Andy Rooney, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Kofi Annan, Alan Dershowitz, Joan Rivers, Ted Turner, Larry King, and Whoopi Goldberg. All could well afford to take a leave of absence, along with many others. While bores and windbags prevail, important qualities also go missing.

Courage, for example. The nation has a lot of unfinished business that goes neglected because nobody has the guts to face it. Take withholding, the practice dating from World War II by which the state gets your money before you do. This should be immediately abolished, along with the current tax code, an atrocity and insult to a free society. Social Security, which would be a criminal Ponzi scheme if set up by private individuals, also avoids reform because Congress is composed of frightened little sissies.

Consider also the quality of eloquence. When was the last time a national leader said anything worthy of that label? It’s even more frightening when you consider that they pay people to write the blather we hear on the evening news.

The Condit-Levy case shows that those people and qualities that should not be missing are, in fact, absent. Those who should be absent instead loom large. It just might be some kind of conspiracy.

- By K. Lloyd Billingsley