The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is obsessed with tearing Wisconsin Governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker down, and is clearly not above distorting the facts to make his pathetic points.
Milbank's latest tirade is about how Walker is allegedly "so dangerous" because he doesn't like unions. That's based on quite a bit of direct experience, which has included death threats against him and his family, frequent harassment of his parents, and attempts by labor to intimidate businesses which wouldn't publicly express support for their cause.
There are at least four misleading contentions in Milbank's column (bolds are mine):
(In a speech) Walker then went on to celebrate his triumphs over the demonstrators who objected to his dismantling of Wisconsin’s public-sector unions, portraying the pro-union forces as violent thugs.
Walker didn't have to "portray" them as "violent thugs." They committed violently thuggish acts in 2011, as Badger State Democrats quietly rooted them on.
... Sixty-five years ago, another man from Wisconsin made himself a national reputation by frightening the country about the menace of communists, though the actual danger they represented was negligible. Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy ...
Unfortunately for Milbank, the unvarnished historical record demonstrates beyond doubt that Joe McCarthy was right, and that the dangers posed by Communists inside the U.S. government was far greater than "negligible." The late M. Stanton Evans ended that argument once and for all, providing all of the proof anyone will ever need in his awesome book, Blacklisted by History.
... (Walker) suggests that the nation’s ills can be cured by fighting labor unions (foremost among the “big government special interests” hurting the United States), even though unions represent just 11 percent of the U.S. workforce and have been at a low ebb.
Though Walker isn't a fan of private-sector unions, his primary focus has been on the public-sector unions which represent 35.7 percent of the public-sector workforce, comprise almost half of all union members nationwide, and virtually control the public-policy levers in many blue states, making genuine reform extraordinarily difficult. Unions have gained such an outrageous level of control over the political process that they, as I noted yesterday, have actually been able to carve out exemptions to municipal minimum-wage laws for themselves.
... After beating public-sector unions and surviving recall, Walker this year signed anti-union right-to-work legislation.
Milbank's description is deliberately incomplete, but necessary to prop up his claim that Walker is against unions in all places and circumstances.
Walker specifically said that he wasn't going to bring forth right-to-work legislation after his bruising election and recall battles. The legislature brought right-to-work leglslation to him. He agreed with it, and he signed it. So?
I should also note that the jury is out on whether right-to-work legislation is presumptively anti-union, or whether it instead forces unions to put more of their efforts into representing workers and less of it into political mischief. As I noted in March, union membership increased in Indiana after the Hoosier State passed right-to-work legislation in early 2012. One union chief, who still opposes the legislation (go figure). specifically credited "unions’ efforts to serve their members" after the law's passage for this result.
In February, in one his many journeys into anti-Walker hysteria, Milbank outrageously screeched that the Wisconsin governor had displayed "cowardice (which) should disqualify him" because he wouldn't comment on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's contention that President Barack Obama "wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country" — as if there isn't a genuine stack of evidence supporting Giuliani's claim.
Both men can speak for themselves, Dana, and so can you — except it would be nice, at least every once in a while, just for the heck of it, to see you make a genuinely honest argument. I won't be holding my breath.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
