The Washington Post is a conservative paper whose own ombudsman refuses to admonish his right-wing writers when they lie, distort or get facts wrong. Thankfully the Post has a few progressive bloggers to keep the big boys in line.
George Will – the Sunday morning WaPo talking head who pushed the discredited “global cooling” meme – today pushed the false narrative that Wisconsin voters rejected that state’s progressive pushback against Governor Walker and his policies. Great, except it bears little resemblance to the truth.
Greg Sargent does what Will should have done – address the facts and present a cogent argument.
George Will’s column today — “Liberals’ Wisconsin Waterloo” — recycles this myth yet again. Will claims that Dems only fought Walker’s proposals because they are in the pocket of Big Labor and they wanted to “overturn the 2010 elections.” Will claims that Dems staged the recalls out of a stubborn refusal to accept that voters had “endorsed” Walker’s agenda, and that Dems and labor were not speaking for the people of Wisconsin in doing so.
The only problem with this is that it has nothing whatsoever in common with reality.
In fact, what actually happened is that voters never had a chance to pass judgment on the radical aspects of Walker’s agenda at all before he enacted it. This is a matter of simple, demonstrable fact. Walker never campaigned on any explicit promise to roll back public employee bargaining rights — indeed, this is precisely what triggered the outpouring of protest in the first place.
You don’t have to take my word for this. Listen to Politifact — and even to Walker himself. At the outset of this fight, Walker tried to claim that he had, in fact, campaigned on his union-busting proposals. But when Politifact asked Walker’s aides to produce evidence of this, they were unable to provide anything even remotely convincing, and Politifact pronounced the claim “false.” What’s more, Walker himself subsequently admitted under persistent questioning that he had never explicitly campaigned on a promise to roll back bargaining rights. And once Walker did spring his surprise union-busting proposal on Wisconsin, the state’s residents resoundingly rejected it in poll after poll. That labor and Dems were able to gather the signatures necessary to stage an unprecedent amount of recall elections is itself testament to public rejection of Walker’s plan.
I don’t know if Will is just getting too old to reason properly or if his ideology causes him to feel he is immune to facts and logic, but he is becoming the David Broder of today’s journalism. That’s a sad prospect, indeed.
