In defense of the GOP

You won't read those words often here.

Wothism generally stands in direct opposition to the Grand Old Party. I certainly don't hold all of the Democratic Party's ideals near to my heart, but I usually don't vehemently disagree with what the party does. That's usually not true of the GOP's actions.

For the first time that I can remember, though, here I am, defending those bastards.

On Monday, Paul Krugman wrote this piece for The New York Times. Most days, I find Mr. Krugman to be dead-on with his assessments. Monday was not one of those days.

If you're not familiar with the situation between UW-Madison professor William Cronon and the state government, here's a quick rundown:

Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

I loved Mr. Cronon's piece in The Times. It was astoundingly good and spot-on, pointing out the absolute lunacy of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's recent moves. He summed up Walker's "ram it through" philosophy nicely when he wrote:

I have found myself returning over the past few weeks to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped bring down another Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy, in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Comparisons of Gov. Walker to Joe McCarthy aside, Mr. Cronon's article was actually fairly balanced. He describes himself as a lifelong independent, and he writes as a historian more than anything.

Still, the GOP didn't like it. It made the GOP look bad, and the GOP doesn't ever take too kindly to that. Their response really should have been expected:

(The GOP issued a) demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.

In  his article, Krugman excoriates the GOP for undertaking this type of action in an attempt to publicly smear those that dare to criticize them.

I'm not writing to condone smear campaigns, though.

I'm writing to say that accessing someone's publicly available records in the interest of doing ANYTHING isn't something to criticize.

What bothers me most is the final paragraph of Mr. Krugman's column:

What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

It's unclear what kind Mr. Krugman thinks "the rest of us" should do to see that Republicans don't succeed in shutting discourse down, although we can infer from a few paragraphs prior that he doesn't think the open records laws should apply to scholars.

Mr. Krugman thinks that scholars will be "deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble." This, apparently, is because scholars will be scared of facing "witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like."

PUH-LEASE.

Is that really any different from any other part of life? Whenever you make a true stand for something you believe in, you're bound to face criticism and you're bound to be closely scrutinized.

Most of all, let's be fair to the law and the public -- the public that pays Mr. Cronon's salary and pays for the computer he uses and the network he uses his computer on. Anyone -- from Joe Smith down the street to the GOP -- has an unalienable right to access his emails. Mr. Cronon, to his credit, is no dummy and said he has always been careful not to use his university email for personal reasons.

If anything, Mr. Krugman's idea that "the rest of us" need to do something to stop this would lead to LESS discourse and LESS openness.

Public records are public. Period.

Perhaps the most interesting part of it all is that Mr. Cronon even wrote this in his original column:

Among (Wisconsin's) proudest traditions is a passion for transparent government that often strikes outsiders as extreme. Its open meetings law, open records law and public comment procedures are among the strongest in the nation.

And it should stay that way.