Newspapers everywhere scurried to add right-wingcolumnists, the more troglodytic the better. Television crews were sent to townhall meetings on health care to film the most shrill, right-wing attacks,whether the shouters knew what they were talking about or not.
So it may seem a strange complaint, but I honestlybelieve the state convention of the Wisconsin Tea Party movement in WisconsinDells last weekend was way, way under-covered.
Very few people heard about the Wisconsin DellsPolice being called to the rally by a Republican candidate who claimed he wasassaulted by a former TV reality show starthe wife of his congressionalprimary opponent, Sean Duffy, who also happens to be a former TV reality showstar and the current district attorney of Ashland County.
OK, so maybe you don't care about the hijinks offormer cast members of MTV's “The Real World.” But we all have an interest inknowing what kind of real world Tea Baggers dream of living in.
Tim Nerenz, executive vice president of the OldenburgGroupa Milwaukee defense and engineering firmand a Libertarian candidateagainst Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, openly compared government under PresidentBarack Obama to a cabana boy who needed to be controlled by those who own themansion.
“And what does a good master do when a cabana boydoesn't know his place?” Nerenz asked. “That's right. He fires him. … We shouldsack the whole mess and start over.”
Nerenz then got the crowd shouting along with him:“We are not the party of no! We are the party of hell no!”
With so much of the open craziness of the so-calledTea Party movement on public display, theMilwaukee Journal Sentinel chose not to cover the convention. It buried afour-paragraph wire service short inside.
That was curious since one of the Journal Sentinel's own staff,right-wing columnist Patrick McIlheran, was being honored at the Tea Partyconvention for “achievement.”
The JournalSentinel usually is not shy about publicizing awards. Perhaps it didn'tknow how to describe exactly what McIlheran has achieved, other than using aformerly respected newspaper to tout the extreme political agenda of the TeaBaggers.
Supreme Court Bias
Of much wider political interest to readers who werenot Tea Bag zealots were the number of mainstream Republican candidates andeven two members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court who attended the convention.
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, running forthe Republican gubernatorial nomination, was there. So was Republican AttorneyGeneral J.B. Van Hollen, who bragged about how many illegal immigrants he haddeported, declaring: “We need to preserve America for Americans!”
Congressman Paul Ryan, who's been getting nationalattention by proposing to privatize Social Security and dismantle Medicare, ina video message proclaimed: “We rightly recognize the American idea is underattack and we have to come to its defense.”
Funny, a lot of seniors hope there are still enoughcompassionate politicians around to come to their defense against attacks onthe American ideas of Social Security and Medicare.
The most curious Tea Party participants were twopresumably nonpartisan members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court: Justices MichaelGableman and David Prosser.
Gableman and Prosser are members of the right-wingmajority on the court, but Supreme Court justices used to try to avoid showingtheir political biases in public. Now, apparently, they feel free to flaunttheir extreme views at incendiary public rallies.
Prosser warned the crowd of evil foreign influenceson government, “George Soros-types flying alien ships into Wisconsin” to try to destroy democracy byorganizing against the election of right-wing justices to the Wisconsin SupremeCourt.
The irony is that Jewish philanthropist Soros, whogrew up in Nazi-occupied Hungary,has donated billions of dollars to create democracies in Eastern Europe andreform the criminal justice system in America.
The media have played a major role in portraying allof the people who were unhappy about the election of President Obama as somekind of exciting, new, populist “movement.”
There is nothing new about those who would demeanthe first African American to be elected president of the United Statesas a cabana boy who needs to be kept in his place by his master.
Belief in white supremacy as the natural order andanti-immigrant cries of “America for Americans!” are among the oldest and mosthateful forms of bigotry Americans of good will have worked together to combatthroughout our history.
Since the media bestowed legitimacy upon theassorted Obama haters and anti-government fanatics who gathered at WisconsinDells, they should have followed up by covering their statewide convention toshow us who these people really are.
