Oh! The Stupid Things I Hear! No. 4

So once again I'm in the car, driving to lunch, and at the top of the hour NPR gives me a news update. This time they are telling me about the campaign launch to force Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker into a recall election.

I've mentioned before that I paid a good deal of attention to the efforts to recall six Republican state senators in Wisconsin earlier this year. I was afraid, then, that the failure to flip the Wisconsin senate back into Democratic hands by getting rid of 3 Republican senators (they were only able to recall 2) would put a dampener on the plans to force Walker into a recall election now (under Wisconsin law Walker cannot be recalled until he has been in office for at least one year; otherwise, the recall effort against him would have begun in earnest months ago). But, so far at least, that does not appear to be the case; indeed, I saw a poll just the other day that indicated 58% of Wisconsin voters support kicking Walker out of the Governor's mansion.

And all of this, of course, is because Walker went out of his way to strip most public employees of their collective bargaining rights last spring. There was no legitimate reason for Walker to do that; he just wanted to break the back of a major Democratic constituency. Although he originally claimed that breaking the back of the public employee unions had something to do with balancing the state budget (which Walker himself had imperiled by pushing through huge tax corporate tax breaks right before he went after working people's rights), in fact the public employee unions already had agreed to cuts in pay and benefits in order to help shore up the budget.

So, no. As Walker later would be recorded saying to someone whom Walker thought was one of his big money backers, the infamous Koch brothers, Walker wanted to break the unions just to break the unions. He was going to be the leader of the start of "something big."

So, now, ordinary Wisconsin citizens are rightfully upset with Walker and want to boot him out of office.

And how did NPR choose to close its report about this recall effort? Well, paraphrasing from memory of only a few minutes ago:

Walker faces recall as a result of his success a few months ago in stripping collective bargaining rights from most public employees. For his part, Walker has taken out television ads arguing that the cuts were necessary in order to shore up Wisconsin's budget.

I'm sorry, but what the fuck? Those two sentences together just don't make any sense. First NPR explains that Walker is facing a recall petition because he stripped collective bargaining rights, then NPR pivots to having Walker justifying his "budget cuts." Hello? NEWSFLASH: stripping collective bargaining rights does not equate to "budget cuts." The two ideas are not the same -- hell! they're not even close to being the same.

But this is, once again, a perfect example of the reflexive need our political reporters have to always, always, always present "two sides of the story" -- even when there aren't two sides.

Seriously, would it have killed NPR to have simply stated the truth? "Walker faces recall as a result of his success a few months ago in stripping collective bargaining rights from most public employees. For his part, Walker has taken out television ads arguing that taking away public employees' collective bargaining rights was the only way to balance the budget."

I mean, sure . . . that statement sounds insane, but that is only because Walker's asserted justification for his action is insane. That doesn't mean the statement is inaccurate.

But I suppose if NPR were simply to report the actual facts, instead of trying to turn this into a typical he said/she said and "who can really tell which side is right" politcal argle-bargle, then it would be too easy for NPR listeners to figure out which side of this issue is full of shit.

And then someone would claim that NPR is biased against Scott Walker for reporting the facts, and that would make NPR haz a sad.

Jerks.

Conservative Sinecures Undermine Our Democracy

I found this excellent piece at the Wits and Vinegar blog arguing that we may be seeing something new with modern GOP state rule: the dismantling of our economic society by entirely unchecked greed. Wits and Vinegar suggests that - bad as things are now - we would be fooling ourselves if we allow ourselves to believe that at some point this dismantling will end out of at least a sense of self-preservation. It really is a very good post, and I urge you to click over and read it in its entirety.

There was one bit, though, that I did disagree with, and it was the suggestion that the Republican governors at the forefront of this dismantling don't realize that they are merely dupes and tools of their corporate paymasters:

[A]ll of these governors are similar, as are people like Paul Ryan -- they are under the assumption that they actually have a political future. It serves the interest of their major backers to have them harbor this delusion, but in reality they are in office only until the people have another chance to oust them for destroying the middle class. They are there to ram through ALEC authored legistlation, bust unions and leave the public education in this country so broken that it will take generations to repair. They care nothing for the long-term cost of such destructive action. Like George W. Bush before them, you have someone who is just egomaniacal enough to think they have what it takes to lead, and deluded enough to think that they are "in touch" and "on the right side of history." My ass. Sorry boys.

While I don't doubt Wits and Vinegar is spot on in her description of these men as egomanical and deluded, I would not go so far as to suggest they are unwitting dupes of their right-wing political backers. Having achieved the governorship in their respective states, they realize they don't have any political future after this -- they just don't care.

Liberals have spent the past decade or more bemoaning the fact that Conservatives have been playing long-ball and have stolen a march on us by creating, funding and supporting a web of right-wing think tanks whose only purpose is to think up and popularize policies and supporting rationales pushing right-wing interests. It seems to have escaped most of us that - in addition to providing a steady drumbeat of Conservative agitprop and policy prescriptions ready to be rolled out the moment Conservatives held power again -- these think tanks also helped to blunt the only power American voters have when their elected officials go to far: the power of the ballot box.

For example, nothing would please me more than to see Scott Walker recalled from office next year for having gone way too far in his entirely unnecessary "scorch the earth" war against Wisconsin's public employee unions. But the damage will have been done nevertheless, and Scott Walker will never have to want. His financial backers will get him a board job at one of these think tanks, a sinecure with a friendly university, and set him up with a lucrative position in some lobbying firm. Scott Walker is going to be just fine for the rest of his days.

Post-politics cushions for rabid right-wingers have become SOP now, further weakening our representative democracy. Why fear the will of the voters if -- once you are out of office -- you can really cash in? The fear that voters would kick them out of office was once the only way to ensure that elected officials didn't go too far in service of their paymasters, but Right-Wing Welfare has largely undermined that protection.

I think Walker and the rest (like the odious Rick Scott who isn't even waiting to leave before cashing in) know this, I think it is at least an implicit part of the deal the Koch Brothers, et al. made with them: destroy the unions, destroy the social safety net, destroy the regulations that vex us, and we will make sure that you are set for life.

I think they know exactly what they are doing, and what they can look forward to. They embrace it.