Friday, March 11, 2011

Skulduggery

Things were going badly for us lefty TV news junkies, having heard about Charlie Sheen for what seemed an eternity. But Wednesday, March 9 showed how good we’d been having it. First we learned that the head of NPR had to resign because of a sting operation by the same lowlife who scammed ACORN. But the real killer was the news from Wisconsin.

In a recent letter I said that Governor Scott Walker seemed to be “a bumbler.” If so he has some smart people pulling his strings. That rope a dope business about a compromise wasn’t conceived by a bumbler. Much of our outrage concerns the chicanery used to get the union busting bill through the State Senate. But in fairness it can be, and undoubtedly is being argued that the will of the Senate was being short circuited by 14 Democrats leaving the state. What bothers, actually frightens me, is not as much violation of parliamentary propriety, as the precision with which the rights of a class of Americans are being eviscerated. 

Since Watergate I’ve felt that skulduggery was a skill for which Republicans had a particular talent. Nixon was a pioneer, but only an amateur. Rather than using a well oiled organization as his successors did, he ran a “mom and pop” operation without mom. From Reagan on it’s been state of the arts. His mentors in this field discovered plausible deniability which was used to insure his and Papa Bush’s tenures.

The current crowd has planned this attack carefully. None of the newly elected governors now trying to kill labor mentioned such a plan during their campaigns. The precision of the timing leaves no question that this is a conspiracy. Wisconsin is only one of the states in their sights and in some the plans go well beyond union busting. Michigan’s new governor is pushing a law that would allow that state to take over financially troubled cities to be managed by whomever it chooses, including corporations. Imagine coming home from a long vacation and learn that you now live in Citi City.

A distinct majority of public opinion views all this unfavorably. But I wonder if we have enough democracy left for it to matter, or if we ever did. Would Nixon have had to resign if Limbaugh and the Fox army had been on the scene with the exposure they enjoy today? There are two aspects to democracy, political and economic. It was the former that did in Nixon, but there is no precedent for the latter. Nothing close to Koch Brothers money was riding on his presidency.

Most past crises were at the time considered “the worst in our history” because we’d managed to survive all the others. We’ll be lucky if in several years we can look at this one with the same detachment. I may have “misunderestimated” Governor Walker. But I stand by my conclusion that these people are playing for keeps.

SKULDUGGERY AS ONLY ONE L

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