Republican disinformation

Republican subversives, the same greedy corporate players that brought us the Citizens United decision and tipped the 2024 election in favor of that incredibly stupid and detached exemplar of vacuity, George W. Bush, have been funneling money into a media saturation campaign in Wisconsin. The campaign is rife with misinformation and deceit. It’s tedious to catalog the lies and to analyze the falsehoods that provide the foundation for Republican Party support of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Walker himself is cut from the same mold as Bush the younger. He’s not terribly bright. He’s not terribly committed to his work or his responsibilities. He is, however, enormously conceited, smug, and self assured. Tonight we’ll see another example of his hollow posturing as he leaves truth and reason behind in the steam tunnel and enters the Capitol through a sub basement with but one thought in the narrow mind that lurks behind those narrow set eyes: “Will I be home in time to watch the Everyone Loves Raymond re-run on Fox 47?” The governor is on auto-pilot. There’s no room for deviation in his game plan. The corporate vultures that are circling the state won’t wait forever. If he can’t kill the spirit of Wisconsin they’ll be off to some state where community has been destroyed and the best morsels of enterprise lie dead and rotting, easy pickings for the carrion eaters of corporate capitalism. For Walker and the flock he feeds, it’s all about profits and public welfare be damned.

In that spirit, a few weeks ago the Republican Party of Wisconsin cobbled together a web video supposedly documenting the “angry rhetoric coming from pro-union protesters in Madison.” The idea behind the video is that we all do it, no side has a monopoly on excessive use of metaphor when political passions are high. (Note my own identification of corporate investors as vultures in the preceding paragraph. I thought about “seagulls circling a garbage dump,” but we’re not there yet, no thanks to Walker.) The New York Times did a meta-narrative blog piece on the video…

Eugene Robinson, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, is shown saying that “Violent political rhetoric and the threat of political violence in this country comes almost exclusively from the right.”

That is followed by a sign from the Wisconsin rallies showing Mr. Walker’s picture with a gunsight crosshair over it and the words: “Don’t retreat. Reload. Repeal Walker.”

In all the hours I’ve spent on the Capitol square I haven’t seen that sign. One person might have made it and carried it to a rally, but I doubt it. The visual context of the sign in the Republican advertisement is a narrow shot, with no crowd of demonstrators around it. As an advertisement it’s effective, but it’s a lie. It’s a lie, but it was broadcast as straight news without attribution on the Fox network. It’s a lie, but white supremacist Haley Barbour referred to it on Meet the Press as if it was emblematic of a Democratic mind-set.

A lot of the video in question is “real.” Early in the struggle, there were plenty of signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Most of us thought that was a pretty dumb comparison. I imagine that tonight there will be some Walker = Gadaffi signage. That’s even dumber. But unless it’s created by a provocateur, I am almost certain there will be no sign tonight with cross-hairs on Scottie. The whole Sarah Palin “kill them to get them out of the way” metaphor is the dumbest of all. We ain’t that dumb!