Today for the first time (where have I been, right?) I saw the television campaign ad attacking Louis Butler for Wisconsin State Supreme Court Judge. The ad, as you probably know, attacked the former Public Defender for simply doing his job – public defending. But I readily became aware that the ad was also a tasteless joke mocking the intelligence of the Wisconsin voter after I read the disclosure at the bottom. Right away I thought here we have an organization (WMC) smearing an attorney for defending his client to the best of his ability, while previously, the same organization supported a judge (Ziegler) for defending her client to the best of her ability. The only major difference here of course is, Judge Ziegler was NOT defending the
People she was sworn to defend, but instead was defending a undisclosed private client.
Why the radically wrong WMC still has any credibility is anyone's guess, but those are the kind of candidates they want and continue to support. By the way, when you see those words (Paid for by WMC) at the bottom of your TV screen or in a newspaper ad, you can’t say you haven’t been forewarned.
Now, I’m not saying the WMC hold secret meetings every week conspiring to take over the world or your town. But what I am about to share is my view of the WMC, which is a self-appointed illegitimate arm of GOP club-for-growth types and other right-wing zealots who support corporate-owned candidates for government, local or otherwise. They will drive a campaign between two seemingly non-partisan candidates to the depths of mutual assured destruction, not just destroying the reputations of the candidates, but to actually make their case so cock-eyed and deliberately wrong as to draw attention to what may very well be their ultimate goal – appointments.
No doubt, there is a state-wide drive to centralize and downsize local government and turn as many democratically elected offices into appointed positions. It is obviously much easier and less costly to influence the appointment process with a sleeper cell or two than it is to accomplish their goals by depending on the whim of the voters. The WMC has enough members in communities throughout the state of Wisconsin that one way or another, they will have at least one member or supporter embedded on any local board or committee drawn up to oversee these appointments. I believe the WMC and its affiliates are responsible for much of the local activism pressing for limiting the role of not only city and county governments, including the State Supreme Court, but to also cut off the power of democracy right at the ballot box.
So, under the veil of political campaign ads that fall just a smidgen short of full-blown personal libel law-suits, the WMC have discovered the formula to accomplish this goal. You won’t read about any of this in their
mission statements (OneWisconsin Link), but they can’t lose because if their corporate-owned candidate wins the office, they win. And if their corporate-owned candidate loses, well, the belligerent WMC (remember, this is a chamber of commerce!!) knows they have taken the political process one more step further down a gutter so petulant and intolerable that both the Right, Left and anybody in between will beg for appointments. WMC influenced editorials will pop up in your town’s newspapers tearing down the partisan bickering and negative ads of political campaigns they themselves have manufactured.
To this, the WMC will celebrate with cases of Dom Perignon below a George W. Bush autographed banner of “Mission Accomplished.”
The WMC, their tactics and mission, should be denounced by the Wisconsin state legislature, and they should not be given the podium at the State Capital to spread their anti-democracy gospel to a captive audience of the people, for the people, or paid by the people.
