The "Why I Was Not Complicit" genre, with a full shelf of books from the Trump administration by now all saying "I was different from the rest of them -- I was the adult in the room" got a little more crowded in recent days with Mike Esper's offering. Esper was Trump's Secretary of Defense beginning in July 2019, when his predecessor, Jim Mattis, resigned. Let us just name the genre WIWNC, for short. (Maybe pronounce it win-see.) I'm not sure whether Mattis has himself written a book in the WIWNC style. But he has been the subject of one. An admiring book by Guy Snodgrass (apparently his real name) appeared soon after Mattis' resignation, called Holding the Line. Anyway, today's subject is the Esper book. It offers a lot of behind-the-curtain gossip about the administration. With regard to the protestors who were in the streets after George Floyd was murdered, Esper writes that Trump wondered why the military couldn't just shoot them. ...