Teachable moments in militarized America
by digby
If you follow the right wing at all you’ve seen the hysterical handwringing this week over a melodramatic piece in the National Review which purports to expose a story of police intimidation and harassment of average conservative supporters of Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Let’s just say the story is a little bit more complicated than that. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:
Fast forward to this new piece in the National Review, which is being breathlessly discussed in conservative circles as if it were the right wing’s version of the Pentagon Papers. It’s the story of jack-booted thugs raiding the homes of Republican activists all over Wisconsin, using such a degree of shock and awe that the subjects have mistaken the authorities for criminal home invaders. The star of this dramatic tale is a woman named Cindy Archer, whom the National Review article describes as “one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the ‘Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, [which] limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions.” The article goes on to characterize her and the other victims of the raids (who are only identified by pseudonyms) simply as “conservatives,” giving the impression that they are being targeted solely on that basis:
For dozens of conservatives, the years since Scott Walker’s first election as governor of Wisconsin transformed the state — known for pro-football championships, good cheese, and a population with a reputation for being unfailingly polite — into a place where conservatives have faced early-morning raids, multi-year secretive criminal investigations, slanderous and selective leaks to sympathetic media, and intrusive electronic snooping. Yes, Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives.
It’s obviously impossible to know any details about the pseudonymous conservatives since we don’t know their names. But Cindy Archer wasn’t just a conservative citizen volunteering her time for cause. Back in 2011, when the story of the raid was first reported, the Wisconsin State Journal said she was an official who had worked with Walker as county executive and followed him to the capital.
Read on. These people weren’t just nice volunteers handing out leaflets. They were high level aides to Scott Walker.
But I agree with these right wingers (even Rush!) who say the authorities shouldn’t be pounding on doors at 6:45 in the morning and storming people’s houses, yelling and screaming and confiscating their stuff. Why they always have to use these strongarm tactics is beyond me. They easily could have knocked politely, showed her the subpoena and basically dealt with her like a human being.
But then that’s not how they do things anymore. They act as if everyone is a terrorist from small time suspected drug dealer to people out on traffic warrants to government bureaucrats. Often they get the wrong house and more than we want to admit actually shoot innocent people in the confusion and melee they cause with their military tactics. But since most of the time they aren’t nice white conservative Republicans people on the right side of the dial usually take the jaded line that they must be guilty of something or the cops wouldn’t be doing it.
Maybe this is a teachable moment. Never say I’m not an optimist.
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