'A bitter irony'

Politico:

Hostility to public sector workers, including teachers, is at an all-time high amid a recession and a new national mania for curbing the tide of fiscal red ink.

E.J. Dionne: 

Consider all of the problems taking a back seat to the deficit in Washington and the media. You haven't heard much lately on how Wall Street shenanigans tanked the economy in the first place....

Paul Krugman:

The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

Observes Dionne further, "Thanks to the Tea Party, we are now told that all our problems will be solved by cutting government programs" -- with a little union-busting to boot.

Concludes Krugman, "There’s a bitter irony here."

Personally I experience more the bitterness than savor the irony.

In today's earlier post I acknowledged Lindsey Graham's partly legitimate debating point about the consequences of elections: Wisconsites democratically installed a 19th-century union-buster with a disgraceful penchant for fabricated crises and disingenuous arguments. Now they "get it." Yet any moderately informed electorate would have recognized the serpent before giving it the chance to strike. They just couldn't be bothered with educating themselves.

Thus we stumble from crisis to crisis or fabricated crisis to fabricated crisis, 9/10s of which are the product not of democracy denied -- as we're witnessing in the Middle East -- but of democracy unbounded.

The concept of the "virtuous people" is as preposterous as that of the "benign dictator."

Comments

[majii]

Even the mainstream republicans and tea partiers who voted these folks into office are in for some unexpected surprises. I'm hoping that some of them will learn that it's not such a good idea to get on a particular bandwagon simply because you like being filled with emotional outrage. Emotional outrage doesn't necessarily equal good governance, just as Fox having high ratings doesn't mean the media outlet is a reliable source for unbiased news.

[Robert Levine]

The first mention by Walker of any restrictions on unions or collective bargaining rights was December 7.

[JS]

There will be some surprises for the Republican voters of 2010, but there will also be the same media (or the same people they listen to around the neighborhood parroting the media) pushing the latest Frank Luntz-tested talking points about why they can't trust the Democrats to solve whatever problems pop up.

I'm wondering if there's any convincing those voters, the answer may have to be re-engaging the 2008 voters who stayed home in a non-Presidential election.