Edit: Title changed to better reflect the gist of my diary.
David Brooks makes my brain hurt again today. Sadly, so do some of my conservative friends, who've generally been moving towards the middle over the past year thanks to Beckian radicalism, but are all "unions are teh suck" this week.
First of all, as noted everywhere around here, it's perfectly okay to filibuster and obstruct if you're a Republican, but as a Democrat? Oh, teh noes! You're disobeying the will of the voters!
Christ.
Examples of the sheer nonsense of their thoughts on the flip side...
Walker’s critics are amusingly Orwellian. They liken the crowd in Madison to the ones in Tunisia and claim to be fighting for democracy. Whatever you might say about Walker, he and the Republican majorities in Wisconsin were elected, and they are doing exactly what they told voters they would do. It’s the Democratic minority that is thwarting the majority will by fleeing to Illinois. It’s the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism.
There's so much wrong with that paragraph it's unbelievable. First of all, as shown earlier today by Barb, there's a lot of things Walker and his gang are doing that they DIDN'T tell voters about. Secondly, he cleverly says, "it's the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism," which keeps him from outright saying, hey, our guys did it for two years straight. Oh, and by the way, it's perfectly legal to do it. It just is SO UNFAIR for them to do it, sayeth the right-wing machine.
And yes, they are fighting for democracy. Walker wants unilateral power to end union rights, cut Medicaid as HE sees fit, and now magically blocked the coordinating website inside the Capitol building in Madison. Hmmm...doesn't sound very democratic to me. If Obama asked for that power, Republicans would be screaming for impeachment. IOKIYAR.
Moving along, the continued argument that public sector unions fight against taxpayers is absurd. They ARE taxpayers. They're not some third-party imported to do work, they're part of the taxpaying public, they're, in essence, helping to pay for their own salaries. They are just as subject to the whims of managerial change as any private sector, as we're seeing right now. And EVEN THOUGH the unions have offered to give pay and benefit cuts that were NOT NECESSARY until Walker and his followers cut taxes enough to unbalance a surplus budget, that's not enough. Republicans (including my conservative but not GOP member friends) continue to act like the unions are being obstructionist and causing the problem. It's infuriating that this is being spun in one way, and Brooks has the temerity to call us Orwellian?
Of course, when the media has totally spun this in favor of the GOP, I'm not surprised that's the meme getting out to the rest of the nation. Oh, the unions and Democrats are being obstructionist, they won't give anything up, blah blah blah. When the only people you see interviewed on ABC and CNN and outlets like them are Walker, Gov. Kasich in Ohio, etc., of course the average person is going to take the side of the GOP. They aren't getting the other side of the story to begin with. Liberal media, my ass.
Finally, there's this gem:
So I’d invite Governor Walker and the debt fighters everywhere to think of themselves as founding fathers of austerity. They are not only balancing budgets, they are setting precedent for a process that will last decades. By their example, they have to create habits that diverse majorities can respect and embrace. The process has to be balanced. It has to make everybody hurt.
They aren't balancing budgets. Walker got rid of a surplus, then decided to rebalance it by screwing over unions. This is preposterous. The man was handed a surplus, didn't like that, because God forbid there be a SURPLUS, so he enacted a crapload of unnecessary tax cuts, and then said, "Hey! We've got a deficit! Those nasty unions need to be disbanded and give up all their rights and pay a crapload more money!" Brooks is so removed from reality on this one that it makes me want to weep for how being delusional is apparently the best way to be a Very Serious Pundit (see Goldberg, Jonah in the LA Times today).
It is important that we continue to fight this wall of misinformation, that we continue to give, that we don't back down an inch. Unilateral powers in the hands of the executive have not worked out well for us over the last decade, even more so when given to someone with extremist ideas. There are consequences to one's actions, and we've been on the defensive long enough. It's time we take the offense and show the GOP that we're not backing down any longer.