Even my wife was appalled.
Friday morning I used the publicly subsidized airwaves to good purpose. I called for Gov. Jim E. Doyle to mobilize the National Guard and deploy it in Milwaukee’s public schools.
Joy Cardin, the gracious host of Wisconsin Public Radio’s Week in Review program commented, "We’ll just leave that one alone" and moved on.
Perhaps I was too polarizing.
Well, isn’t that what governors do when there is a disaster? They call up the National Guard. And Milwaukee’s schools ARE a disaster!
70 percent of its students can’t do math. 60 percent can’t read. Fewer than half graduate. Money is not the problem; MPS spent more per student than 13 of 15 "comparable" districts recently studied by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Picture this: the National Guard patrolling the halls, bayonets fixed, would assure discipline and without discipline you cannot have learning. It would also send a message to the teachers union.
Yes, the mayor of Milwaukee needs control over this disaster site. Jim E. Doyle managed to get one right! Let’s encourage such behavior! Milwaukee teachers, you think you’ll get a better deal with Scott Walker?
Tear Down this Wall!
The Week in Review radio program pairs conservative thinkers such as the squire of Stately Blaska Manor with a sacrificial liberal. Last Friday’s road kill was Bill Lueders, news editor of Isthmus. About the tragic Fort Hood massacre, Bill opined that the U.S. Army should a better job of keeping guns out of military bases. Your BlaskaBlogger retorted with this profound comment: Wow!
Bill also waxed rhapsodic over the soothing dulcet tones of our TelePrompTer In Chief. What a privilege it was to listen to a good speech as opposed, I guess, to Bush Two.
The Obamaman sounds great but what does he actually say? Content, man! The Blaska Policy Research Center and Experimental Work Farm is exploring the theory that the sound of Obama’s voice works like a cricket rubbing its hind feet together; that it is a kind of mating call to which liberals subliminally succumb, their cognitive senses rendered useless. It’s Pavlovian.
Because I will be damned if the man has said anything significant except Yes We Can, which the WalMart smiley face said first and less expensively.
You want moral gravity? How about "Tear down this wall!"
Ronald Reagan spoke those words in front of the infamous Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987. We are mentioning that today because it was 20 years ago this month, in November 1989, that the Wall came tumbling down!
A wall that hundreds of Germans died trying to flee Communist rule, often impaled on barb wire as the East German soldiers left them to die.
Nor did Reagan say what a wonderful idea it would be if somebody, some time would perhaps remove a portion of the wall. No, Reagan addressed Gorbachev by name.
"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe ... come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. (wild applause] Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" (Even greater applause.)
Even Reagan’s own State Department — the striped pants boys — waged a last-minute battle to strike the words from the President’s speech. Too polarizing!
Consider what it took to utter those courageous words:
- Jimmy Carter was warning Americans off their "inordinate fear of Communism."
- Gerald Ford refused to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
- And before that, the Nixon-Kissinger detente.
Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War? "We win, they lose." That was what today’s chattering classes would call simplistic but what history is already calling a bright-line of moral clarity. No confused relativism for this courageous president.
As Anthony R. Dolan writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Reagan had carefully arrived at the view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in ore acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind’s abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty and its right to rule and victimize others.
Now THERE is the beef! "Criminal regimes?" I guess so.
The man who had called the Communist Soviet Union an Evil Empire caused conniption fits in the likes of Congressman Bob Kastenmeier who, I remember, at the time fretted that such language was "clearly unsettling." Damn straight!
"Tear down this wall!"
Somewhere in the Gulag, Natan Sharansky was electrified, tapping the message in code down the coldwater pipe to his fellow inmates. Sharansky later wrote a book called "Fear No Evil." Ronald Reagan feared no evil!
That is more than The Current Occupant can muster, for all his supposed gifts of gab. Consider that Obama had the temerity to give a speech in Berlin during his campaign last year. Tell me, please, what he said.
Now freedom lovers everywhere are celebrating the young people in Iran who had more courage to call out his nation’s repressive theocracy than the Leader of the Free World. (That would be Barack Obama, by some estimations. Except for the "leader" part.)
"Obama," they chanted, "you are either with us or with them." In Washington, President Obama said, "The U.S. wants to move beyond the past, seeking a relationship based on mutual interests and mutual respect."
... (In Iran) Security forces showed little mercy. Not even defenseless women were safe from the baton-swinging ... pro-government militia.
"Mutual interests"?
"Mutual respect"?
That’s just ... polarizing!
President Reagan, a weary nation — and freedom-loving people everywhere — turn their lonely eyes to you.
Another polarizer is on track
The Capital Times has a pretty fair personality feature on Bill Richardson, the retired UW music professor who has led opposition to Dane County’s backdoor tax grab, aka: "the Regional Transit Authority."
Sure as shootin’, here is Mark Opitz raising the "divisiveness" issue, which is the Left’s equivalent to a temporary insanity plea.
Mark Opitz of Middleton, who supported the RTA, says Richardson is an effective advocate for his more conservative views on transit, but Opitz adds that ultimately, that effectiveness has led to more polarization and less room for meaningful dialogue.
In other words, Bill Richardson stands convicted of not agreeing with Mark Opitz. Now, if he agreed with Mark Opitz, who votes with the Progressive Dane caucus on the County Board, why, then Bill’s dialogue would be "meaningful" and less "polarizing."
Hey, Mark: why don’t you quit voting the Progressive Dane party line. Now that would be less polarizing!
Catch Bill Richardson’s web site The Great Train Robbery. As Bill says, it ain’t over yet.
Hizzoner for Governor
Paul Soglin for governor. ... Late last week he issued this challenge: "If there is no viable Democratic gubernatorial candidate by Thanksgiving, I will announce my candidacy on December 1, 2009." On Monday he adds
progressives must tend to the management and administration of government. We must make a genuine commitment and not leave the field to the Scott Walkers. They hate government and public employees.
Gee, that’s kind of ... well, polarizing. But hey, nobody loves government like Paul Soglin. The more the better! Taxes? Raise ‘em! (Reach for the sky!) During his last campaign for mayor (let’s hope), Soglin did the old side-step on my proposal to merge the separate city and county health departments. Said it needed to be "studied." At least three studies were already in the books. All concluded: Do it, already!
But Soglin’s blog is a fair measure of the Democrats’ desperation. They have no credible candidates and the election for governor is less than one year away! Tom Barrett of Milwaukee remains the great white hope, even though he is cut from the same centrist, not-quite blue dog cloth as Jim E. Doyle. But Barrett has not put forward his name. That tells me that the man does not have the fire in his belly. He can’t pull the trigger when now is the right time to do so — now, when the field is completely clear. Now, when he could avoid a divisive primary while the Republicans slug it out in one of their own.
The consequence of the Milwaukee mayor’s Hamlet act is that other Democrats who might jump in are circling the landing strip in a holding pattern to see what Barrett does.
My nemesis John Nichols (really, a nice guy off the printed page) promotes state labor boss David Newby for governor. I’ll do one better: John, do a Bill Buckley Jr. Run for governor yourself! It would make a great book. You could not do worse than Ed Garvey in 1998. Of course Buckley, when asked what he would do if he won the 1965 bid for Mayor of New York answered, "Demand a recount!"
Now Dan Bice is reporting in the Milwaukee Journal–Sentinel that Barrett could function as governor from Milwaukee. I think that is true to an extent. It was the rare day that Tommy Thompson did not fly or drive to some part of Wisconsin. The governor’s personal State Patrol and Capitol Police details are well skilled in moving the chief executive swiftly and securely. The Capitol renovation of 1998 added an underground parking and secure entry for the governor so he does not have to walk down the halls of the Capitol in order to get to the second floor of the East Wing.
What’s more, we do live in the Internet age. But people want to see their governor —the Speaker of the Assembly as much as the ladies in the supermarket checkout line.
Barrett still has children at home but even if he does stay based in Milwaukee he’ll have to say goodbye to a normal family life no matter where he bases his operations. Because the governor’s day does not end at 5 p.m. That hour only announces the onset of fund-raising cocktail parties, after-dinner trade convention speeches and the like.
The union puppet masters
Lukas Diaz, the proprietor of Forward Our Motto (Backward Our Politics) has this insight into the puppet masters behind the local Obama cheerleading section:
From Russell Wallace (who was at one time on the Dane Dems Executive Board and who ran for Chair of the Dane Dems): The Democratic Party of Dane County, for instance, is essentially controlled, quietly and behind the scenes, by a union, AFSCME Council 40.
Log in