Her final ad is a shameless exercise in mendacity.
By Avner Zarmi in PJ Media
Yes, a swastika ad. First, the background.
Mary Burke’s thin résumé could only be highlighted with one claim:
as an executive of the Trek bicycle firm, she managed their European operations
so brilliantly that sales rose exponentially under her watch. Surely such an
exemplary manager and problem-solver was just the ticket to serve as Democratic
Governor Jim Doyle’s commerce secretary, and is now the person to end the
political divisiveness which has characterized Scott Walker’s first four years.
This bubble burst last week when Gary Ellerman, who had worked 21
years for the Trek corporation, serving as vice president in charge of human
relations, revealed the devastating truth: Trek’s continental European
operations had suffered substantial losses under Burke’s leadership. She had
caused critical personnel problems, such that she was stripped of her
responsibilities by upper management, forced to return to the U.S. and to
apologize to management for her incompetence, and then allowed to take her
now-famous snowboarding sabbatical.
Burke’s only possible defense is to discredit this testimony, and
Ellerman does have an Achilles’ heel: he himself had subsequently been
terminated by Trek (he says over differences in hiring philosophy), and he is a
politically active Republican, indeed, chairman of the Jefferson County branch
of the party.
Two things prevent this from becoming a case of “he says, she
says.”
The first is that Ellerman’s account of the affair has been
confirmed in all its essentials by Tom Albers, who was president of Trek at the
time and who conducted the review of Burke’s operations at the request of her
father, then CEO, which led to her dismissal from the position.
The second is the absolute silence from Trek, currently headed by
Burke’s brother, concerning the entire affair.
Burke’s account also requires that one believe that such a
stellar performer would be “downsized” by her own family after two years on
the job. She has tried to sell that with this ad, as picked up by the
Washington Post.
The ad is one long exercise in mendacity. Let’s unpack the lies in
order.
Gary Ellerman has postings on his Facebook page showing swastikas.
The implication of the ad is that Ellerman somehow approves of the ideology
represented by the swastika (more precisely, the Nazi variant of the ancient
Hindu symbol, called the Hakenkreuz). Yet the first picture shows
activist Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who has been engaging in tactics of
intimidation reminiscent of the Gestapo, superimposed on the symbol of National
Socialism. Ellerman clearly does not approve of Parker’s methods.
The second picture, which simply shows the Nazi flag, is posted to
explain that the Nazi swastika was presented to a desperate German people,
tired of an endless series of inconclusive parliamentary elections and unstable
coalitions and wracked by severe economic hardships, as the symbol of “hope and
change.”
Mr. Ellerman, in other words, is clearly not a Nazi sympathizer.
His remarks about Burke are not “lies,” as they have been
corroborated and Burke has done nothing to refute either Albers’ comments or
Trek’s silence.
Next, Ellerman was not fired for “incompetence,” but over a
difference in hiring philosophies between Ellerman and Albers’ successor, John
Burke. To believe otherwise requires believing that it took Trek senior
management 21 years to decide that Ellerman was incompetent.
Recall, they reached that judgment concerning Mary Burke in just
two.
Next, Governor Walker is accused of “sleazy politics,” and
allegedly being under investigation for “illegal campaign activities.” The
trouble with this: two judges, one a state judge and the other a federal judge,
have ruled that the activities alleged under the legal theory of the
investigation do not violate Wisconsin state statute, but that the
investigation itself, launched by a highly partisan Democratic district
attorney married to a public-employee union activist, does violate the
constitutional rights of all those being scrutinized.
The “six associates” of Walker who were convicted were either: (a)
convicted of embezzling funds from a veterans’ charity set up by Walker, who
had requested the investigation in the first place when he first became aware
of the financial irregularity; or (b) were low-level staffers convicted of such
“major crimes” as posting comments to a newspaper article and other such
“political business” on government time or using government computers.
As was revealed in one of the 16,000 pages of emails dumped by the
current Milwaukee county executive, Walker had the staffer who posted the
comments suspended as soon as he became aware of the activity.
Sorry, Mary Burke — your ad reveals much more about you than it
does about Scott Walker.
The original link can be
found at: http://pjmedia.com/blog/burke-campaigns-last-refuge-the-nazi-card/?singlepage=true
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