John Gardner on Cronon at The Grauniad

2Apr/110

John Gardner on Cronon at The Grauniad

On several occasions (here, here and here), I've posted on the NYT op-ed written by UW-Madison Professor William Cronon. Vaporous assertions about Wisconsin's political history aside, it was, in my view, an attempt to justify on the basis of tradition the accusation that Scott Walker is the temperamental equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy, also from Wisconsin. I suppose that, being a moderate, he thought his comparison was more fair than the Walker as Mubarak and Hitler posters he saw at the Madison rallies. And as I noted at the time, a contemporaneous revelation about a collaborator with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg coming clean about passing on nuclear secrets out of fealty to the USSR pointed up the insidious leftist rewriting of that era and its historical figures. You can read about Morton Sobell in The Guardian, here. Oh, I'm sorry. Here.

Now comes John Gardner at The Guardian:

Even Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy, who famously went after professors at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Hopkins, Chicago and virtually every other great American university, went easy on his home state's and his own alma mater. Perhaps the wily McCarthy, whose name is synonymous with the practice of reputational decimation by accusation and innuendo, knew something that today's Wisconsin Republicans don't understand: even the most conservative Wisconsinites have an inveterate, as well as historical, sense of fair play.

There you have it, folks: we've gone from Walker not quite meeting the Hitler standard, but certainly temperamentally akin to Joe McCarthy, to Wisconsin Republicans are actually worse than Joe McCarthy, with, of all things, an appeal to fair play.

Let's not forget that it was Walker's opponents who demanded he release the emails of private citizens expressing their opinions on the Budget Repair legislation, because they didn't believe that he was telling the truth when he stated that the majority of his correspondence on the matter was in favor of the steps he was taking. And let's not forget, either, that in their extraordinary lame duck session, Democrats tried to pre-empt any action the incoming Republicans might take on the budget and unions by passing union-friendly legislation with much less floor debate than was given to the Budget Repair bill. Fleeing the state, some might say, wasn't exactly fair play on the part of the Democratic Senators who talked a big game about compromise, but wouldn't truly negotiate. Madison's Mayor got involved by colluding to delay publication of the bill. And then there's the business of death threats and racket-like thuggery on the part of union supporters against politicians and regular citizens alike, not to mention candidate Kloppenburg's bizarre double standards regarding "outside money" and convenient lack of interest in condemning ads falsely accusing her opponent, Justice Prosser, of coddling child abusers.

What does Kloppenburg's judicial philosophy look like? Ace has a pretty good idea.

So, when you read Mr. Gardner on the subject of fair play, you have to wonder where he's coming from, and . . . voila!

John S Gardner is a labour, cooperative and school organiser. During his 30 years in Wisconsin, he directed Work for Wisconsin and was founding chair of the Milwaukee Equal Rights Commission. John served from 1996 to 2003 as the at-large school board member for Milwaukee public schools and was a member of the United States Education Commission.

This struggle is about one thing only: whether unions have the right to make the state collect their dues for them whether the member, who must be a member in order to be employed, wishes it or not, and whether subsequently they have the right to spend 93% of it on Democrats, whether the employee wishes it to be so or not. Elsewhere, under governors much less abused, there have been massive layoffs, and much less screeching.

I wish that these folks wouldn't have filed an Open Records request for Professor Cronon's correspondence, but as opposed to the "rights" people commonly assert on the part of unions--privileges that they've abused to the point where many citizens believe they no longer deserve them--they do have a right under the law to them. So, don't ask me whether at long last I have no decency, you asshole.