Republican Governor Scott Walker has dismissed the
candid conversation he had with a blogger posing as billionaire David Koch,
saying it proved nothing except he "says the same thing in private as he does in public."
Well, sure. Except for a public admission that Walker's efforts to strip collective bargaining rights has nothing to do cutting costs and everything to do with destroying unions, because during his conversation with the faux-Koch, Walker laid it all out ... in fact, he grandiosely likened his efforts to the fall of the Berlin Wall:
I told my cabinet ... about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We'd already kind of built plans up but it was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb. And i stood up and pulled out a picture of Ronald Reagan and said this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan ... had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers. And I said, to me that moment was more important than for just labor relations or even the federal budget, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism ... in Wisconsin's history, this is our moment, this is our time to change the course of history ... for those who thought I was being melodramatic you now know it was purely putting it in the right context.
Listeners learned quite a bit from that 20-minute conversation: that layoff threats are just one of the "four or five angles" Walker is pursuing, that he's working on a ruse to get the quorum he needs, that planting agitators among the protesters was considered, and of course, that Walker is tired of "outsiders" sticking their nose in Wisconsin's business -- said while detailing his entire governing strategy to his billionaire-backer from Kansas.
But during the entire course of the conversation, concern about the budget never came up. Why? Because it's not about the budget. As Walker made clear during his paean to Ronald Reagan, it's about union-busting. Or as Walker described it, "the cause":
Thanks for all the support and helping us move the cause forward and we appreciate it and we're doing it, the right and just thing for the right reasons and it's all about getting our freedoms back.
Freedom. Just another word for nothing left to lose ... unless you're a state employee in Wisconsin.