Posts Tagged ‘recall’

Narcissistic Infantilism Among the Wisconsin Left

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Now that a week has passed since Scott Walker’s decisive victory in the Wisconsin recall election, I wanted to touch on one issue that helped contribute to the left’s defeat in the recall, namely the narcissistic infantilism displayed among a small, but highly visible, set of Wisconsin liberals. Their actions helped Walker win the recall election.

First up, let’s take a look at their whiny self-regard, as exemplified by Crying Man:

“We worked so hard.” Well, too bad; Republicans worked harder, out-hustled and out-voted you. It’s like a member of Generation Participation asking for a good grade just because they showed up and tried, even though they got the answers wrong. “I worked so hard! Can’t you just give me an A?” And complaining that it’s “the end of Democracy” because your side lost is such pure narcissistic, drama queen behavior that I’m surprised to hear it from anyone over the age of twelve. Did he shout “You’re the worst dad in the world!” the last time his father refused to let him borrow the car keys?

Or take the liberals shown here the day after the election:

So, while all of you in the People’s Republic of Madison were having your Happy Singalong Drum Circle, Republicans were manning phone banks, registering voters, and running Get Out the Vote drives. Maybe the first two or three days of singing and drumming helped the cause by drawing attention to the fight; after that they were an exercise in petulant self-indulgence.

And speaking of self-indulgence, drama queens and that video, what did the two liberals haranguing CNN’s bus driver think they were accomplishing? You lost. Whining about them calling the election earlier than you thought they should, especially after they were proven correct, is like an eight year old throwing a temper tantrum because she doesn’t want to go to school.

Also, notice something else about those two videos: all the use of personal pronouns. I, my, we, etc., as though the results of the election were a personal affront. Here’s a hint, Dorothy: It’s not about you, it’s about good governance and the will of the voters in a democratic republic.

Of course, don’t forget about how liberals kicked off their pro-union, anti-Walker protests last year:

Was there not a single adult among all the recall supporters to go “Hey, wait, acting like complete assholes might alienate voters”? Did they forget that they were in the Midwest, where “direct action” isn’t considered cute or “empowering,” but as rude jackassery?

A certain class of liberals seems to miss the excitement of the early civil rights protest era, missing the fact that Madison in 2011 is not Selma in 1959. Your actions aren’t aimed at convincing voters, but at drawing personal attention to yourself for throwing a hissy fit. “Look at me! I’m a college radical! My ideas are more important than yours, and I’ll scream and shout until I get my way!”

Here’s Amy L. Geiger-Hemmer describing all the ways recall supporters alienated voters:

Without your tantrums, outbursts and boorish behavior we might have stayed home for this election. Without your filthy, pot smoking hemp-headed minions occupying and violating the Capitol we might have been complacent. Without your obnoxious protests, boycotts and other actions from your union playbook, we might have sat this one out.

But you couldn’t hold back. You couldn’t restrain yourselves and behave like adults. You couldn’t accept the 2010 election results. We sat and watched as you erupted in a juvenile hissy fit that embarrassed Wisconsin . The spectacle you created is what motivated us. And thanks to your ill-mannered behavior, we won.

Read the whole thing.

Still another sign of their infantile infatuation with 1960s radicals was their use of Socialist Realism iconography for their signs:

Did they really think signs that could have been created under the regimes of Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro were a swell way to win over independent voters? Or did they just not care? (Psst: Here’s a hint guys: The real solidarity was fighting communist puppets, not democratically elected state officials.)

But what it all boils down to is bunch of privileged, white, well-to-do radicals, many in their 20s, more interested in politics as a form of external therapy and personal attention than with actually accomplishing anything. All their screaming, drum-banging tantrums not only failed to accomplish anything, but like the similar actions of Occupy Wall Street, they were counterproductive exercises that alienated independent voters and potential allies.

And judging from the blog posts of people who hang out in places like Daily Kos and Democratic Underground, they still don’t seem to have learned a thing.

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Still More Wisconsin Recall Election Tidbits

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Still more Wisconsin recall tidbits continue to trickle out. I may have a more substantial reaction to a particularly egregious type of liberal self-delusion regarding the results later, but here’s a nice sampler of links:

  • “Public employee unions insist that dues money be deducted from members’ paychecks and sent directly to union treasuries. So in practice, public employee unions are a mechanism for the involuntary transfer of taxpayers’ money to the Democratic Party.”
  • Charles Krauthammer nails it, as usual:

    The unions’ defeat marks a historical inflection point. They set out to make an example of Walker. He succeeded in making an example of them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism. An institution founded to protect its members grew in size, wealth, power and arrogance, thanks to decades of symbiotic deals with bought politicians, to the point where it grossly overreached. A half-century later these unions were exercising essential control of everything from wages to work rules in the running of government — something that, in a system of republican governance, is properly the sovereign province of the citizenry.

  • “The left picked this fight, on the issue and in the place of its choice; it chose to recall Walker because it believed it could win a showcase victory. That judgment was fatally flawed.”

    The Walker reforms hurt AFSCME in Wisconsin almost as badly as Ronald Reagan hurt PATCO, the air traffic controller union he famously crushed in 1981. Public sector workers have deserted their unions in droves since the state clipped union bargaining rights and stopped automatic collection of dues. After a string of bitter, humiliating and expensive defeats, labor in Wisconsin will now be a shadow of its former self, lacking the troops, the money and the morale.

    The public sector unions are critical to what remains of the American left. The power of the public service unions in Democratic politics pulls the entire party to the left and gives ideas that are important to the left an access to power that they would otherwise lack. But more important than that, they provide a kind of center to a movement that otherwise threatens to fragment into antagonistic cliques.

  • Ace on why the union gravy train is doomed.
  • It is not clear the left was outspent in its attempts to reverse Gov. Walker’s reforms. And the widely-repeated claim that the left was outspent by more than 7-to-1 in the most recent recall election is clearly false.
  • Karl Rove looks at the numbers.
  • Peggy Noonan says “The vote was a blow to the power and prestige not only of the unions but of the blue-state budgetary model.”
  • Jesse Jackson compared Scott Walker to George Wallace.
  • And Jon Stewart’s Daily Show uses the occasion to get in the show’s weekly Affirmative Action quota of barbs aimed at the left:

    • The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
    Madison Men – Scott Walker Prevails in Wisconsin Recall
    www.thedailyshow.com
    Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

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    Roundup Of Wisconsin Recall Reactions

    Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

    Here’s a nice juicy roundup of reactions to Scott Walker’s Wisconsin recall victory, and what it means:

  • “The resounding failure by unions and Democrats to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on Tuesday is a significant moment for democratic self-government. It shows that an aroused electorate can defeat a furious and well-fed special interest that wants a permanent, monopoly claim on taxpayer wallets.” Also: “Public unions are never going to cede their dominance over taxpayers without a fight.”
  • “For Democrats, 18 months of campaigning and more than $31 million later, Wisconsin is a bust.”
  • “Walker won because he represented the taxpayer, while his opponent represented the groups whose livelihoods depend on bilking the taxpayer.”
  • Walker won because his policies work.
  • You know those exit polls showingObama would still win the state by 12? Adjusted for the actual election results, they show the state is a dead heat.
  • “The Walker victory is a big win for a more traditional form of democracy and a big loss for what Herbert Croly called ‘progressive democracy.’”
  • NRO Symposium: “The public union is a Tocquevillian nightmare.”
  • Did the Tea Party put Walker over the top?
  • Going county-by-county, Democrats had good turnout. It was just that Republican turnout was better.
  • More lessons from Wisconsin, including the note that liberals weren’t complaining when union money was dominating elections, or when Obama raised over $1 billion in 2008.
  • Despite liberal assertions to the contrary, “none of the money spent on Walker’s behalf would have been illegal before Citizens United either.”
  • Jim Geraghty says that Scott Walker has done the Wisconsin Democratic Party, the public sector unions, the progressives and angry leftists a favor: “He has liberated them from the soothing illusion that they are popular, and that the public agrees with them.” Sorry Jim, can’t agree with you there. Go over to Daily Kos, or Democratic Underground, or even Twitter, and you’ll find that the liberal capacity for self-delusion is essentially infinite. For example, many are crowing that they actually won the recall because they picked up the state senate seat they needed to flip that chamber to Democratic control. Oh, one problem: It’s not scheduled to meet anytime between now and November, when redistricting will probably flip it back to Republican control.
  • Consensus distillation of winners and losers.
  • Let’s take a look at the reactions of one of the less delusional liberals. Of course, there’s the usual hard-left refusal to consider the possibility that public employee unions have become a parasitic class that is helping to drive government toward insolvency, and an insistance that if they just fought harder they could have won. But there’s also a fairly cold-eyed realization that Republicans fought better, organized better, and played to win:

    The Republicans mobilized, just like we did. But they mobilized their party, they mobilized their donors, they didn’t do it in a half-assed cover your ass way where their ego wasn’t on the line. They doubled down on Scott Walker. They showed no weakness. They played to won, and, ultimately, they won.

    (Some snippage, including how the DNC was willing to pour money into the losing campaigns of Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson but not Wisconsin.)

    I hope we can see from this that when it comes to certain people and certain causes, the Democratic Party pulls out all the stops. They spend it in ways that are not related to any strategy of furthering progressive goals or shoring up progressive long term assets like union organization and GOTV. This isn’t about strategy to them. It’s about control.

    So when you look at the Republicans gleefully celebrating, give them credit, because this is a massive victory for them. They didn’t just win handily. They saved a hero, a man who stood up to the unions and didn’t flinch, a man who, while divisive, divided things correctly as far as they were concerned. And he’s just one of many to come. Because if you can get away with this shit in Wisconsin, as mad as people were there, and if you can get away with this without the Democratic Party even really putting its ego on the line… Well, keep on going. To the sea, if necessary.

    I raised the image earlier of a Confederate general on his horse on a hill watching the Sherman’s Union soldiers raze the fields. Imagine now a woman, down there in the fields, her fields, looking up, and seeing that general on his horse, shrugging, saying, “I guess shit happens. Madame, you have my sympathy.”

    There was talk on CNN today with Democratic experts like Paul Begala addressing the issue of whether what happened today in Wisconsin would affect Obama in November. The somewhat strained consensus of the Democratic experts was, naw… Wisconsin ALWAYS votes Democratic in presidential elections.

    It votes Democratic because of unions and grass roots GOTV organizing. The money and effort that they DID NOT put into Wisconsin today would have gone to strengthening and shoring up that organization. You can be quite certain that the Republicans, who busted their asses on this election, built up their Wisconsin organization. That’s permanent asset-building. The Democratic Party saw no value in it.

    That’s why they won. That’s why we lost. Koch brothers, Citizen United: all of them are less important than you really think. You can’t win if your party doesn’t think it’s important enough to really try.

  • Moe Lane may have accomplished the best troll.
  • If you want to drink deep, deep droughts of liberal anger, denial, and self-delusion, then head on over to this Democratic Underground thread which is (as you might imagine) NSFW.

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    Wisconsinfreude

    Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

    You’ve probably heard that Governor Scott Walker easily won the Wisconsin recall election last night. Between now and when Walker was elected in 2010, the result of each election has been worse and worse for unions and their liberal Democratic Party allies.

    I may have a more comprehensive roundup of reactions later, but for now let’s enjoy the rich, zesty aroma of liberals going down in defeat in the battle they choose.

    First up, scoring a weepy 10 on the Drama Queen Schadenfreude scale, is this extremely pale recall supporter proclaiming how Walker’s victory is “the end of democracy”:

    How upset were Barrett’s liberal supporters? One of them was upset enough to slap Barrett, the candidate she was supporting, for conceding:

    Here’s DNCC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the gift that keeps giving to Republicans, on how no one can match their grassroots organization:

    Of course, now that Walker has won, liberals have graciously conceded to the will of the electorate. Ha, just kidding! They’re issuing death threats to Walker.

    And, of course, the inevitable Hitler parodies:

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