Monday, May 21, 2012

Walker's Way is not the Wisconsin Way


Walker is not Wisconsin and that is why he must go. He refuses listen. He won't compromise or negotiate. The day after our Packers won the Super Bowl he told his inner circle that he was going to "drop the bomb", referring to his previously hidden agenda to make scapegoats of our public employees and strip them of their workplace voices. He ruined our victory celebration! That's sneaky. It's impolite. It's authoritarian. And it's not the Wisconsin way.

He single-handedly ignited a political civil war, deeply dividing our purple state, our families, our friends and our neighbors with his “divide and conquer” strategy. We Wisconsinites do not seek to divide our citizens and we certainly do not labor to conquer our neighbors. That is not the Wisconsin way. In Wisconsin we’re not arrogant; we don’t pass with 52% and then act like we got a 100!

This is not about political parties; this is about Wisconsin and who we are. Thirty thousand Wisconsin citizens spent countless hours standing out in the cold to gather the expressed written will of the people to recall Scott Walker as provided by our State Constitution thanks to the legacy of our great progressive Republican leader, Robert "Fighting Bob" Lafollette. I think I can confidently claim that few, if any, of those 30 thousand would have stood for even 30 seconds to recall any other Wisconsin Governor, Republican or Democratic. Simply put, that is not our manner. But Scott Walkers extreme un-Wisconsiness has forced our hand.

The state I love does not willingly suffer authoritarianism. We neither seek to exert authority over our friends and neighbors, nor bow to the false authority of would-be plutocrats who seek to rule us by "virtue" of their extreme wealth and in service only of even more greed. In Wisconsin we are not money-god worshippers. But Scott Walker is not Wisconsin. He is an uncompromising authoritarian and he bows to the false authority of wealth as demonstrated by his fawning on the phone with who he believed to be Oklahoma petro-plutarch David Koch. Alas, that is in keeping with his fundamentalist ideology, which is alien to Wisconsinites.

Walker’s way is not the Wisconsin way. We believe we can run our own affairs here, yet most of the vast sums of money Scott Walker has collected, including for his own criminal defense fund, is from out of state billionaires. That is not the Wisconsin way.

We need to heal our state, so we can get back to our jobs, our families, friends and neighbors. Scott Walker's very Un-Wisconsin extremism has consistently lost jobs and malevolently divided the people of Wisconsin in the name of extreme ideology and party above all, bomb dropping partisanship. Scott Walker hasn’t lived in Wisconsin long enough to understand that “My way or the highway” is not the Wisconsin way, perhaps he never will. Our Constitution provides a remedy for this malignancy. We Badgers need a Scottectomy. And then we need to heal our Wisconsin.

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