Democracy wins in Wisconsin

When you've lost the Washington Post ... oh, never mind.

Now that Scott Walker has decisively won Wisconsin’s recall election, I wonder if we’ll be hearing any expressions of remorse for the smears, false rumors and general vilification that his opponents have hurled at him over the last year and a half.

Will there be apologies from those who toted posters depicting him as Hitler? Any second thoughts from, say, Conor Oberst, the leader of Bright Eyes, the indie rock band, who called Walker a “fucking Nazi,” and urged his audience to “every day egg his fucking house.”

I would like to ask Gerald McEntee, the leader of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, if it was a bit excessive to call Walker’s budget reforms “an attack on the freedoms of every Wisconsin citizen”?

Now that Walker has been freely and peacefully elected — again — does Harold Meyerson regret writing that Walker’s policies represented “a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany.” How about Katrina vanden Heuvel? She, too, pushed the Cairo analogy, asserting that the fight in Wisconsin was “about basic democratic rights and the balance of power in America.”

What's wrong with public sector unions? 

Union money and manpower confer political clout, which unions use to, in effect, elect their own bosses. Behind closed doors, they then decide how much the public will have to pay for education, transportation, and other services. They call it “collective bargaining,” but the unions are represented on both sides of the table.

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