Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Scott McClellan: A John Dean Moment, Not A Democrat

Tuesday night I watched the first of the Bush Administration talking heads, including some 'expert' from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, respond to Scott McClellan's  "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

The former White House press secretary was quickly assaulted with a limited and dull collection of bromides:

• If he was so concerned about these matters, he had the obligation to speak up at the time.
• He betrayed the White House.
• He sounds like a Democrat.

From  Bush apologist Frances Townsend, on CNN we got "Scott never did that on any of these issues as best I can remember or as best as I know from any of my White House colleagues."

From the White House,  the AP reports,"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House," said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, a former deputy to McClellan."

As for Secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice (also AP), we are told her response was, "Those who were skeptical should have spoken up at the time and argued against U.N. sanctions such as the oil-for-food program, she said."

None of these and the myriad of other replies addresses one fundamental point - no one will take on McClellan head on and deny the truth of his allegations.

The notion that he sounds like a Democrat, must bring a smile to the lips of John Dean. The Watergate Era staffer to Richard Nixon, and author of Blind Ambition,  faced a similar, though somewhat more demanding, crisis.

Both men knew that eventually history would catch up with them (also see Stanley Kutler's  The Wars of Watergate ) and their presidents.

Faced with the ugly lies and the disapproval of their colleagues, both Dean and McClellan chose the truth, the temporary label as turncoat, and the long-term contentment of honesty.

That is not a Democratic quality, I hope.

Blaska on Meadowood Crime: A Disappointment

When Marc Eisen of Isthmus called to request that I write a few words on solutions to Meadowood crime, I jumped at the opportunity. When he added that he made the same request of Dave Blaska, a conservative who once represented the community on the Dane County Board, I figured it would be interesting.

Wrong.

When I opened my Isthmus on August 30, 2007 I found this from Blaska:

Giuliani's police chief in New York, William Bratton, upended the conventional wisdom that "crime...was caused by societal problems that were impervious to police intervention," reports the August edition of Governing magazine. He proved that effective policing does not respond to crime, it actually prevents it...

...Yes, send in the surge — hire more police. But give them the Giuliani-Bratton marching orders: drive, walk, bike, and bus the beat. Issue citations for littering, public drunkenness and vandalism. Respond to every noise complaint, crack down on loitering, throw the pissers off the bus and, yes, bust minor drug users.

This is pure nonsense. Just add Blaska to the long list of conservative pundits who do not have a clue as to what Bratton did in New York City.

Three days earlier, I posted: Misinformation: From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel to Charlie Sykes,  where I took them to task for relying on the Governing Magazine article and not having a clue as to what Bratton did in NYC. Everyone is picking up on Bratton's assertion:

Crime, the theory went, was caused by societal problems that were impervious to police intervention. That was the unchallenged conventional wisdom espoused by academics, sociologists, and criminologists. I intended to prove them wrong. ----  New York City Police Chief, William Bratton, in his book, The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.

The problem is they are not reading the entire book but just taking he filtered material from Governing Magazine. This misses Bratton's point.

As noted in that post:

There is no bigger an advocate for Community Policing than Bratton.  He understands that quality of life variables influence crime, and that law enforcement needs to acknowledge that. Bratton used neighborhood police officers, decentralized command and gave more authority to the precinct officers. Referring to his mentor,  Bob Wasserman, a firm opponent of racial profiling, Bratton wrote:

Wasserman explained that police can't be an island, that we have to work in partnership with the community...He was one of the first in the profession to understand and define the elements and potential of what we came to know later as community policing...

...But the central point of this post is that Slaske's op-ed piece and Sykes' blog post is a far cry from what William Bratton did in New York.

If the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission uses Slaske and Sykes as a measure for hiring a new police chief, they will not get a William Bratton.

Bratton worked with the academics, sociologists, and criminologists; he simply did not allow their analysis to leave his department feeling that police intervention was meaningless and ineffective. But he used the tools of those other professions in building his overall strategy to combat crime.

By the way, Bratton supports gun control laws and firmly opposes conceal and carry.

Madison's Kite Aerial Photographer

Craig M. Wilson is Madison's photo-documentarian from above, but not from a helicopter or airplane.  Craig's is more a bird's-eye view: a few hundred feet up and very dependent on the winds.  Craig, in his day job a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat in the City of Madison's Department of Planning and Development, has a hobby/business/artistic calling as an internationally recognized kite-assisted aerial photographer.

Browse his website, "FromaKite," and check out his photos of Madison places and events from above.  Shots of the Terrace, Camp Randall during football games, and the Capitol are spectacular.  He's got a great book, too, "Hanging by a Thread."

- Barry Orton

Book Review: "Shadow Divers" and "The Last Dive"

Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything To Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War Two and The Last Dive: A Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths by Bernie Chowdhury both tell the same story of the risky attempts by a group of amateur divers to identify a wrecked World War II German U-Boat off the coast of New Jersey. 

Chowdhury narrowly focuses on the father and son who died in a futile attempt to gain glory by finding the logbook that would definitively ID the submarine and its mission. A pedestrian and uneven accounting of a  disaster caused by male bonding through thrill-seeking, The Last Dive drafts behind the wake of Shadow Divers like a VW behind an 18-wheeler on the Interstate.

Kurson takes the wider view and lets us in on the lives of the two key organizers of the many dives and archival research trips that ultimately let them piece together the real history of the U-Boat and its crew, whose remains still lie in the twisted steel coffin of the sub, not far from the entry to New York's harbor. In Kurson's hands, the historical detective story becomes every bit as interesting as the thrilling and dangerous dives. It's a book well worth reading.

There's been a PBS special, "Hitler's Lost Sub," and director Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner," "Thelma and Louise,"  "Gladiator") is in preproduction of a full-blown movie of Shadow Divers.

- Barry Orton

Book Report: "Charlie Wilson's War"

The late George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, tells the tale of the CIA's secret support of the Islamic mujahadeen's ultimately successful war against the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Red Army.  Pushed by Democratic east Texas Congressman "Goodtime" Charlie Wilson, the CIA armed and financed Afghan tribes' guerrilla forces to the point that the Red Army suffered their equivalent of Viet Nam, which set the stage for the  Soviet Union's collapse.

Taught by the CIA to wage a high-tech hit-and-run war of resistance, the mujahadeen became the foundation for the Islamic fundamentalist movement that has come back to bite its sponsors in a big way.

The intricate details of Congressional logrolling, secret defense spending, and illegal CIA foreign policy involvement, and how they revolved around Wilson's personal foibles, make this book fascinating reading.  How the CIA secretly armed, trained, and financed the mujahadeen with our tax dollars makes it required reading to fully understand today's political morass.

(Tom Hanks is producing and starring in a movie version that will be released this winter.  Read the book now before the details get lost in the publicity shuffle.)

- Barry Orton

"Articulate" Hurts Deaf People Too

Henry Kisor, one of my favorite authors, complained in his blog that presidential wannabe Senator Joe Biden's "compliment" to presidential wannabe Senator Barack Obama that he was "articulate," often stings him too, as Kisor is profoundly deaf:

Something similar, in my view, goes on when a well-meaning hearing stranger praises me for being articulate or “speaking well.” The dynamic isn’t quite the same — racism is not involved — but in some ways it is dead on. White folks tend to be surprised when black folks speak excellent standard English. Hearing folks tend to be surprised when deaf folks speak understandable standard English.

Many times people I’ve just met say “How well you speak!” as if it is a great surprise a deaf person’s speech can be understood at all. (Mine is quite imperfect but if you listen and there is no other sound to distract you, you’ll understand it.)

It irritates me because (as in the case of African-Americans and “articulate”) this kind of patronization comes from low and ignorant expectations of the capabilities of deaf people.

(if you don't know Henry Kisor, he was the longtime Book Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, now retired in Michigan's UP.  Kisor's 1997 book on his fulfilling a dream of becoming a pilot and reenacting a historic 1911 solo cross-country flight ("Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 feet") is a gem for anyone who has ever caught the flying bug, and his 1994 portrait of the state of American railroading ("Zephyr: Tracking A Dream Across America") is one of my favorite travel books. Kisor has more recently been writing mysteries set in the UP;  I have it on good authority that the murder victim in the next one is a blonde bombshell schoolteacher from Madison who has "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here" tattooed in cursive script above her groin.)

Kisor had the best Art Buchwald tribute I've read yet:

... I wrote in a review of a very funny collection of essays by Calvin Trillin that Trillin was “the thinking man’s Art Buchwald.” I thought at the time I was complimenting both men, but I was too obtuse to see that the remark was left-handed about Buchwald.

When his publisher plucked the quote for an advertisement, Trillin had great fun twitting his pal Buchwald about it. Realizing my error, I wrote a little note of apology to Buchwald.

“It’s OK,” he wrote back. “Just make me the thinking man’s Calvin Trillin in your next review of a book of mine.”

Of course I couldn't do that, because it would have been a conflict of interest. But now I have the opportunity.

The world of journalism has lost its thinking man’s Calvin Trillin.

The world of journalism lost its thinking man's book editor when Kisor retired.

- Barry Orton

Book Report - "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson"

Robert Caro's "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" is the third of a four-volume biography that is really a 1200-page operating manual of the United States Senate in the guise of an intimate history of Johnson's rise to power and control of that key institution. Lyndon Johnson manipulated, lied, cheated, and double-dealed his way to the top, and Caro has made it his life's work to show us just how despicable Johnson was, both politically and personally.

Powered by a constant river of oil and gas money from his Texas backers, Johnson manipulated everyone and exploited everything in his path from the time he entered the Senate in 1950 until he ran successfully for Vice President in 1960.  If you don't like to watch the legislative sausage being made, you don't want to read Caro describe Lyndon Johnson at work.  If the backroom deals that really make our democracy function hold your interest more than the media spin put on them later, this is your book.

The key event in "Master of the Senate" was Senate Majority Leader Johnson's triangulation of the southern racists and the northern liberals to manage passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.  He saw the bill as a path to the presidency by proving his saleability as a friend of labor and minorities while at the same time protecting his southern credentials by only allowing very watered-down language to be included in the final law.  How Johnson managed to simultaneously dominate liberal Georgetown dinner parties and reinforce the most reactionary and racist politicians of his time is both enlightening and repulsive.

Caro is still writing his final volume on Johnson's vice-presidential and presidential years. I hope it is available soon.  An intensive look at how a Texan manipulated his way into the presidency and escalated an unwinnable war might come in very handy.

- Barry Orton

Book Report: IBM and the Holocaust

Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation is possibly the most powerful book I've read about the World War II era in recent years. Black details how IBM's Hollerith punchcard technology was essential to the Nazi's 1933 census that allowed an accurate pinpointing of every Jew in Germany, and how the IBM subsidiaries later tracked every Jew and other "undesirable" in most of the occupied countries. Card-sorters owned by IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag ("Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft") were used to round up Jews and assign their possessions, route the trains carrying them to the camps, sort the slave-workers from those assigned to the gas chambers, bill German industry for the slave labor, and efficiently conduct much of the business of production for the war. As the "Solutions Company," IBM played a key role in the Nazi's "final solution."

As a detailed summary at the Hacknot website explained:

Nearly all concentration camps had their own Hollerith Department. Camps such as Dachau and Storkow had as many as two dozen sorters, tabulators and printers installed. The Hollerith Department tracked inmates by assigning each one a Personal Inmate Card. The department also issued daily work assignments, as well as tracking the health status of each inmate. Daily totals of still living, deaths and transfers were wired to Berlin.

When a new inmate arrived at a concentration camp, each inmate was assigned a Hollerith number. In later years, that number was tattooed onto the inmate's forearm. Another card, called simply the Inmate Card, was held at a central statistical office in Berlin. The Inmate Card contained details such as the prisoner's profession. This information was used to match skills to work assignments.

Without IBM's machinery, the logistics of the camp system would have been unmanageable. The total number on inmates in the camps varied between 500,000 and 700,000. The inmates were tracked and manipulated with Hollerith technology from the moment of deportation from their home territory until the moment of their death in a camp.

All the while, IBM's founder, Thomas J Watson, Sr., had conducted an elaborate campaign of double-dealing: an FDR backer and intimate, Watson was given an Eagle with Star medal in 1937 by Hitler in Berlin for help legitimizing the Nazis with the International Chamber of Commerce. When the US placed legal impediments on IBM's direct control of its German subsidiary, IBM's Swiss office managed to serve as a go-between, so that the flow of punchcards, machine parts, and services to Germany never ceased, and opportunities for profits never lost.  Even with the entry of the US into the war, and Watson's subsequent reluctant return of the medal, and the placement of Dehomag into Nazi trusteeship, IBM continued to protect its assets in occupied Europe while doing enormous business with the US war effort.

Because of Watson's political influence and the US military's growing dependence on IBM's technology,  the war crimes trials never came near the company or its executives.  While most IBM records have since been carefully sanitized, we owe Edwin Black a huge debt for his dogged pursuit of the truth, and for his meticulous explanations as to how IBM used its political influence to avoid US oversight in the pre and post-war periods.

- Barry Orton

O. J. Simpson: A New Level of Depravity

We shook our heads at Death of A President, a story more about the loss of liberty and freedom in America following the fantasized assassination of President Bush. Now O. J. Simpson brings us another unnecessary chapter, in fact too many chapters, in the never ending saga of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Death of A President did not need the set up of a murdered President, but as the story unfolded we were given a chilling depiction of a real scenario in this country of the loss of liberty.  It is speculation that contributes to the public dialog; it is content of redeeming social value.

In his new book, Simpson "describes how he would have murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and waiter Ronald Goldman—if he’d actually done it."

Spare us. In If I Did It, the formerly accused vaulter of airport debris, must be desperate for coin as the film royalties are rapidly drying up. There is much that is obscene in this country:

Dick Cheney looking at us with a straight face telling us that Halliburton is not stealing millions billions from the American people.

Donald Rumsfeld looking at us with a straight face telling us the war in Iraq is too complicated for mere mortals to understand.

George W. Bush looking at us with a straight face telling us he knew what he was doing when he sent hundreds of thousands of civilians and many soldiers to their death and destabilized an entire country.

Tom Delay, Abramoff, and the entire lot of thugs and thieves telling us they are loyal Americans.

Damn, I guess Simpson is just a small time piker after all.

Veterans' Day Book Report: The Wild Blue

This week I finished reading "The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1945-1945", Stephen Ambrose's history of the World War II bombing campaign that broke the back of Germany's war machine.  Centered on the experiences of former Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the book is a tribute to the Army Air Force crews that conducted the campaign at great personal risk. In 1972, President Nixon's goons tarred McGovern's anti-Vietnam war campaign with charges of "weakness" much as President George W. Bush's operatives "swiftboated" genuine war hero John Kerry in 2004.

In "The Wild Blue", Ambrose wrote of McGovern:

I felt at the time of the election that he should have pressed the issue of his war record a bit more. For whatever reasons, he chose not to. But yes, I would like the American people to know more about what he did during the war. I hope this will foster, not so much McGovern's appeal to a wider audience, but the understanding that you don't necessarily have to be a hawk to be patriotic. McGovern is one of the greatest patriots I know, and his anti-war stance doesn't make him any less of one.

Next week, McGovern is due to address the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which includes Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin and Gwen Moore as members. Using his new book, "Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now" as a script, McGovern will argue:  "The best way to reduce this insurgency is to get the American forces out of there. That's what's driving this insurgency."

Today, John Nichols uses Ambrose's point to remind us that:

The crisis of this moment in history is that those who know about war and peace, about when to fight and when to use diplomacy, have not been listened to by the Bush administration. And that refusal to take the wise counsel of veterans has cost this country dearly.

Thousands of young American men and women have been killed in Iraq since Gen. Wesley Clark and other military men warned against invading that country. Hundreds of young American men and women have died in Iraq since one of the most decorated veterans in Congress, Pennsylvania Democrat Jack Murtha, said a year ago that it was time to start bringing the troops home.

The best way to honor those who have fought to protect the U.S. on this or any Veterans Day is to listen to the veterans.

- Barry Orton