Brew City Brawler

Poetry for Armistice Day

Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen...

And Reconciliation, by Siegfried Sassoon.

Go see Tom Frank tonight, 7 p.m., Schwartz's on Downer

The Brawler realizes he's buried the lead in some previous entries encouraging his 2.4 readers to see Tom Frank tonight  at 7 at Schwartz's on Downer, where he'll be reading from his latest, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

One last tidbit from the book, which captures the challenges ahead in cleaning up the mess the Republicans have made of the country over the past decade.

Throwing the rascals out is no longer enough. The problem is structural; it is inscribed on the map; it glows from the illuminated logos on the contractors' office buildings; it is built into the systems of governance themselves. A friend of mine summarized this concisely as we were lunching together in one of those restaurants where the suits and the soldiers get together. Sweeping his band so as to take on the fellow diners and all the contractors' offices beyond, he said, "So, you think all of this is just going to go away if Obama gets in?" This whole industry, this whole economy, all these profits.

He's right, of course; maybe even righter than he realized. A century ago, in the classic period of business government, an epidemic of public theft persisted despite a long string of reformers in the White House. Republicans and Democrats, each one promising to clean the palce up. Nothing worked, and for this simple reason: democracy cannot work when wealth is distributed as lopsidedly as theirs was -- and as ours is. The inevitable consquence of plutocracy, then and now, is bought government. As Justice Louis Brandeis said at the time, "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both." It is a bitter lesson that we will have to re-learn all over again.

The price of admission is buying a copy of the book (retail $25). The Brawler believes it's worth it -- but if that's too rich for your blood (if your portfolio took a beaing today!) -- go in with a friend as you get two admissions with one book purchase.

Tom Frank on GOP voter suppression: "It's called 'projection'"

Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas? and the recently published The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, will be speaking at 7 tonight at Schwartz's on Downer. The Brawler recommends all go (the $25 investment to buy the book is well worth it).

The Shepherd Express caught up with Frank, and the Brawler was happy to see the interviewer riddle him on a topic near and dear to the Brawler's heart: GOP voter suppression.

From the Shepherd Express:

Shepherd: With these Republican hard-liners in power, we’ve seen Democratic voters disenfranchised by falsely branding them as felons in 2000 in Florida or under-supplying voting machines to Democratic wards in Ohio in 2004. Now, Wisconsin's attorney general is pushing a procedure that would probably discourage voting.

Frank: It’s called “projection.” You imagine that the other side is doing it, and it justifies anything you do. If you look at conservative literature, you see this Republican article of faith that there is epidemic voter fraud, that the Democrats are somehow doing some kind of incredible, huge voter fraud. It’s amazing to be accusing the other side of fraud while you are committing fraud yourself to keep people from voting.

The Brawler would suggest Republican faith in voter fraud is actually paranoia (sometimes race-based) when it isn't cynical manipulation.

Washington didn't change Republicans

One of the more humorous Republican conceits since the 2006 electoral debacle is that they were defeated because they somehow were seduced by Wa(r)shington. It's Washington that made them run the nation's finances, military and international standing into a ditch.  It's Washington that made them a party to a level of corruption not seen since the Gilded Age.

"We wanted to change Washington -- and Washington changed us," the John McCain's and Paul Ryans tell us. 

It's an absurd story -- the Republicans had controlled Congress for 12 years and the White House for six. If harlot Washington had been able to seduce them, they must have been more than a little willing.

Thomas Frank, the Kansan-born scourge of modern conservatism, demolishes this argument in his latest book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. He's speaking tonight at 7 at Schwartz's on Downer and, if you can (You've got to buy the book to get a ticket for two), the Brawler highly recommends you go. He's as good a speaker as he is a writer.

An excerpt from the introduction:

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. ...

But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities -- priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. ... Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because the disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action. ...

Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teachings of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend": when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad concservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

Every conservative loves a bully

From Thomas Frank's "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" (pp. 51-52):

 

There are, of course, bullies from every walk of life and every political persuasion, but on the right bullying holds a special, exalted position. It is no accident that two of the movement’s greatest heroes – Tom DeLay and Oliver North – had the same nickname: “The Hammer.” This is a movement that adores bullies, that cheers their bullying slogans at its conventions, that longs fro a bully mean enough to put the weaklings back in their place forever, that has lionized bullies from Joe McCarthy to Westbrook Pegler to Bill O’Reilly to George Allen to Michelle Malkin...

And so it goes with Wisconsin’s right wing. Whether it’s Charlie Sykes berating callers after hanging up on them, Jessica McBride hailing "smackdowns" and fantasizing about strapping Russ Feingold to a chair, Texas Hold Em Blogger calling Mexicans “Chihuahuas,” Mark Belling calling Mexicans “wetbacks,” Fred Dooley engaging in the most childish name calling while demanding "civility," or John MacAdams insulting priests, bullying is one of the defining traits of local movement conservatives.

The Wrecking Crew

"They're very good at negative campaigning. They're not so good at governing," Obama Khan says of Republicans.

People have seen Republican governance and they're turning up their noses at it, says Rick Perlstein, a lefty historian whose work on the rise of the Republican right has been hailed by such Bolsheviks as George Will and Bill Kristol. (Seriously, spare no expense and buy Nixonland. You'll never stop thanking yourself.)

And now comes Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas" among other works, with his latest, "The Wrecking Crew:� How Conservatives Rule," a study of how Republicans make a mockery of government as described in civics textbooks (are there still civics textbooks?) and how Mark Graul's buddy Jack Abramoff is an exemplar of this approach rather than some bad apple.

An excerpt from the USA Today:

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past; that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrinkwrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are on the take—our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and pharisee that is Tom DeLay—or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the clichés roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors' glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists' mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.

Democrats have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a "culture of corruption," a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans, for their part, have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology—an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!

…

The truth is almost exactly the opposite: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people.

But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities—priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. Conservative's leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job.

Buy it at Schwartz's and get a ticket for two to see him when he comes to Schwartz's on Downer on September 29.

Nixonland comes to Brew City

The Brawler urges one and all to descend upon Schwartz's on Downer Ave. at 7 p.m. on Thursday to catch a reading by Rick Perlstein, author of the recently published Nixonland. Nixonland charts the rise of Richard Nixon and the political, racial and cultural rifts that he helped exacerbate from the mid-1960s through early 1970s -- divisions that still shape our national polity.

CNN had decent write up on the book a while back.

By showing up you'll not only be able to catch an appearance by a sharp historian, gifted writer and incisive social observer. You'll also be supporting a native son: Perlstein was born and raised in Fox Point (not Whitefish Bay as the Brawler once falsely claimed).

Indeed, in Nixonland's acknowledgments (p. 837),Perlstein credits that noble Milwaukee institution, the Renaissance Bookstore, as a source of inspiration for the book:

Or maybe it was conceived when I was sixteen years old, taking advantage of my new driver's license to trek to the cavernous Renaiisance Bookstore in downtown Milwaukee, burrowing in the smelly basement where they kept the old magazines from the sixties stacked higgledy-piggledy in  mountainous piles.

The Brawler suspects he was there at the same time (albeit borne by bus) hunting down old H.P. Lovecraft paperbacks, including a fractured 1969 Lancer edition of The Colour Out of Space.

Is "Bush Lied, People Died" a slander?

Man, does Rick Esenberg hate those "Bush Lied, People Died" bumper stickers.

From Shark and Shepherd:

My second post ("Being serious ...) was prompted by commenters who repeated the slander that "Bush lied and people died." If you believe that, I do think that you are either misinformed or hopelessly partisan; even not serious.

As those familiar with intertron traditions know, nothing is worse than being called "not serious."

But people also know that saying something is a slander doesn't make it so. 

The Brawler supposes that people like Esenberg would make the argument that, "Bush was acting on the best intelligence available. Obviously in hindsight it was the wrong decision. Iraq did not have WMDs But presidents, particularly in wake of 9/11, sometimes must make difficult choices with the information they have, imperfect as it may be."

But the thing is, Bush and other members of his administration made statements to drum up support for war that exaggerated the strength of the intelligence for those claims or in some cases were contradicted by the available intelligence. And, as for the claim, "Well, the CIA said..." It's still not clear to what extent the Bush Administration i.e. Dick Cheney pushed the agency to take a harder line in its assessment of the threat that Iraq presented.

Fred Kaplan on the the mellifluously titled  "Senate Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq By U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated By Intelligence Information" :

Some of the officials' claims, the committee concludes, were "substantiated by available intelligence information." This was the case for allegations about Iraq's biological weapons facilities, its ballistic-missile programs, and its support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaida.

In several instances, the claims were backed by the intelligence estimate's majority view but were disputed by some of the agencies. (An NIE is a consensus product, put together by the nation's 16 intelligence agencies; if some of the agencies disagree on some point, they often file a dissenting footnote.) This was the case for the claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program and that it was building unmanned aerial vehicles for the purpose of dropping biological weapons on Americans and our allies. The Senate report chides the officials for failing, at times willfully, to take these dissents into account.

On a few other issues, officials made claims with great confidence, whereas the intelligence reports expressed considerable uncertainty. This was the case for claims about chemical-weapons production and the prospects of postwar stability.

Finally, several claims had no basis in, or were even contradicted by, the official intelligence reports. These include the claim that Saddam Hussein intended to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, that he had a partnership with al-Qaida, that he had WMD facilities in deep underground bunkers, and that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague in 2001.

It is worth noting that the claims that reflected U.S. intelligence—on biological weapons, ballistic missiles, and support for non-al-Qaida terrorist groups—were, while serious, not the sorts of threats that would rally a nation to war. Meanwhile, the claims that did galvanize support for the invasion—on nuclear weapons and alliances with al-Qaida—either exaggerated or falsified the intelligence of the day.

For example, page 15 of the Senate report notes that Cheney in September 2002 stated there was "irrefutable evidence" that Iraq had reconstituted nuclear weapons -- a claim supported by some agencies but questioned by others (State, DoE). Page 16 notes that Cheney asserted Iraq could, unless stopped, create a nuke in one to three years (Meet the Press, March 16, 2003). That contradicted findings of the NIE,which said it would take Iraq 5 to 7 years or, in a more unlikely scenario in which it obtained fissile materials, 3 to 5 years.

And of course, Bush would also make statements that went beyond the findings of available intelligence: "And he (Saddam) is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon." (10/7/02). "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball,it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." (10/7/02)

One could go on (the Senate report does for 170-plus pages) but you get the picture. The administration made scads of scaremongering statements about Iraq going nuclear to drum up support for the war -- the only way they could drum up support for the war -- and none of these very specific statements were supported by intelligence that possessed remotely the authority the president or his lieutenants suggested (and yes, hanging Cheney's statements on Bush is 100 percent fair given that Bush is the decider).

Now, it's entirely possible that Bush et al deeply and seriously believed that Iraq was an existential threat and they believed that the intelligence they had proved that -- or that future evidence would come to light. (Or that evidence that contradicted their assertions, such as Hans Blix making hash of their certainties weeks before the war, didn't deserve to be taken seriously.) But in making their case to the American people -- who did not necessarily share the decade-old dream of many administration figures in taking down Saddam -- I think that any serious person who looks at the record would have to agree they exaggerated the strength of their case and their information.

A lie is defined by my Webster's II as "a false statement purposely put forward as truth; falsehood;something meant to deceive or give a false impression."

If the slander fits, put it on a bumper sticker.

here we go

Schwartz's on Downer tonight -- be there

To see journalist and author Richard Longworth, who wrote "Caught in the Middle," about the Midwest's plight in the era of globalization and what we need to do about it.

Gig starts at seven.

More here.

Schwartz's on Downer, Monday night -- be there

To see Richard C. Longworth, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, who'll be discussing his book "Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism."

Trying to get a handle on globalization's impact on the Midwest, Longworth clocked 11,000 miles on his car to visit dying rural towns, destitute inner cities as well as such nodes of the new world order as Chicago and Warsaw, Indiana (the global center of artificial hips and knees, an example of how communities can benefit when companies in the same line of business "cluster" together).

His assessment: the Midwest is the region of the country least-equipped to compete in the new era. That said, he thinks it has the tools and intellectual resources to survive and potentially thrive. Greater cooperation between its universities (he makes the point that in aggregate the Midwest's universities represent an unmatched resource of brainpower) is part of it. Greater connectivity between its farflung cities is another (hello, high speed rail). Investment in education. Embracing immigrants. Nurturing industries of the future, notably things green.

On the flip side, low taxes aren't a panacea. Xenophobia is a killer. As is clinging to a old ways.

Julia Taylor, of the Greater Milwaukee Committe, describes her thoughts on the book here.

Sadly, the Brawler won't be there. But if he were, he would ask Longworth if he thinks Milwaukee is well-served by a conservative establishment -- including a county executive -- that opposes any kind of rail transit, including rail that would facilitate travel between Milwaukee and the Midwest's global juggernaut, Chicago.

The gig starts at 7.