Here's a disingenuously oddball employment of my reaction to Epic Systems's decision to avoid vendors associated with Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.
At something called Fox Politics, Lance Burri uses this item as a springboard to ramble about "sacrifice" and "courage" which, for one thing, aren't necessary components of heroism and for another, two things I didn't even mention, let alone attribute to Epic Systems.
It's always nice to get a link — even if it is for the benefit of readers of Fox Politics, whatever that is — but it would be even nicer if the linker actually read what it is they're linking to.
Hopefully the Fox Politics readership's respective comprehension is at least marginally more adept than Lance Burri's.
I did contemplate a hypothetical situation whereby an Epic purchasing agent ended up spending more than necessary because the low bidder was involved with WMC's scurrilous campaign of lies against Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler.
But I hardly consider that either courage or sacrifice. I was simply acknowledging one particular high profile Wisconsinite's recognition of a fact that many of us low profile Wisconsinites started noticing a long time ago. Call it vindication, if you wish.
For what it's worth, Burri's is an amusing ramble, I suppose, and he can "boycott" whomever he likes. Who cares? Fill your boots, Jack, it's a free country. Or so conservatives are fond of telling us. When it suits their purposes.
Besides, the said ramble impressed the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's "right-wing guy" Patrick McIlheran enough to cite it approvingly, so that's something. If McIlheran has his way, maybe it'll even make Best of the Wisconsin Blogs. It would be a perfect choice, unwitting incoherence generally being a prerequisite for selection.
For his part, McIlheran would do well to actually read Epic's initial press release, and the further clarifications reported by the Isthmus two days later, all of which are embedded in my modest little tribute to Epic's founder and CEO Judith Faulkner.
Yet McIlheran asserts that Epic's position is that Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce "is just too, well, political in a way that Epic Health Systems [sic] doesn't like."
(He'd also be well advised to report the company's correct name. Epic Healthcare Systems Corp. was administratively dissolved in 1996. I hear tell that the accurate rendering of proper names is a key to establishing a reporter's credibility, the inference being if a reporter can't even get a proper name right, what else did he get wrong.)
Burri and McIlheran are free to believe it's all about politics, of course. But it isn't. It's about dissembling and falsehoods.
In any event, none of this is surprising, since McIlheran himself played right along with those who were blatantly and shamelessly lying about Justice Butler's record throughout the election campaign.
So it's little wonder that he continues to insist on missing the point even at this stage of the game. Guilelessness, thy name is McIlheran.
July 8, 2008
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3 comments:
I enjoyed the way the first round of commentary about Epic worried about their profitability and stock price. Har, har.
Where's the worry about the innumerable companies whose CEOs are spending precious company time on WMC's political work? And then there's the dues. Doesn't that hurt the bottom line? They're worried about Epic's spot price on bulk copy paper, but not on the time the WMC-member CEO spends on non-business, on the company dime?
I'll give Lance credit for using the correct quote "try not to". Most other WMC wanna-be-lackeys inflated Epic's position into something far more threatening.
“…it would be even nicer if the linker actually read what it is they're linking to.”
Seems to me that's exactly what you're doing. Notice the word I used to link to your post? “Heroes.” You called Epic’s CEO a “corporate heroine.” That’s why I linked, and for no other reason: not to rebut anything else you said, but to rebut that description.
Heroism may not require sacrifice (a word I never used but that you quoted anyway), but it certainly requires risk. It certainly does require courage. Can one be a hero, even though his/her actions are perfectly safe, and carry no amount of risk at all? Give us an example. Even a hypothetical one.
If what Epic did is heroism, the word has lost all meaning. I’m thinking it has no meaning for you. It’s just a nice word for you to use when you want to justify what someone on your side of the political spectrum does.
The justification is written all over the campaigns of Gableman and his supporters and for me, this has never had anything to do with politics.
I'm not expressing any admiration for Ms. Faulkner's politics, whatever they are, only for drawing much needed attention to WMC's disgraceful activities.
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