Wisconsin Club for Growth Red-Baits, Names Names

Some smart-ass must have signed me up for the Wisconsin Club for Growth email list, as once a week I get the pleasure of their idiocy in my inbox.  To return the favor, every once in a while I lay into them on the internets, such as when they repeatedly lambasted Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board for following the law.  Seems a fair trade.

This week’s adventures require some slight background.  A different arm of the Kochtopus–a stupid word, but I think adequate to convey the sense that WCFG, like so many other conservative-for-hire groups, has at its core a pro-corporate, cheap-labor philosophy and is paid for by the corporations that benefit from those policies, and it feeds on the work of others whose existence is paid for by those same corporations and–

Sorry, got lost there.  Anyway, a different arm of the Kochtopus, called “Media Trackers,” though its material is mostly anti-whatever Democrat, not anti-media, because when you get right down to it the media are not, in fact, all that liberal, if the best evidence for this is a dozen people standing outside the offices of the Journal Sentinel because yet another arm of the Kochtopus thought that would be a good idea, is–

Dammit.  Lemme try again.  An arm of the Kochtopus called Media Trackers ran the names of employees at the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office through their magic recall database machine, and found that something less than 20% of the employees there signed a petition to recall Governor Scott Walker.  The light bulb–a militantly incandescent light bulb, no doubt–went off and Media Trackers went up with a story suggesting the John Doe investigation of Walker, led by Milwaukee County DAs, was therefore bogus or somesuch, two plus two being whatever the memo said today and all.

Media Trackers is not new to this; they recently, for example, insisted that the Judicial Commission investigating the alleged strangling of one state Supreme Court Justice by another was full of people who signed the recall petitions and, therefore, people unfit to judge a former Republican lawmaker Justice.  Giant fail on their part, as exactly zero members of said commission had signed.

So what was the final word on DAs who signed?  Take it away, Bice:

A conservative research group alleged Monday that several dozen employees in Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s office signed recall petitions for Gov. Scott Walker.

But prosecutors overseeing the long-running John Doe investigation of Walker’s current and former aides weren’t among those who signed, said Chisholm’s top aide.

So the score so far is Media Trackers: 0, Reality: ALL THE THINGS.

Underlying all of this is the incredible deja vu you get:  Is this the 1950s again?  Is Zombie Joe McCarthy now running the GOP media operation?  From the beginning, when the right insisted that the names of recall petition signers be not just public record but easily available in a searchable database format, the implication was clear–exercise your right to sign a petition and expect the right’s hellfire to rain down upon you.

So what does Wisconsin Club for Growth do with this information, that none of the people prosecuting the John Doe signed the petition?  They name names, that’s what.

Their Wednesday email blast this week recapitulated this story, and, rather than shrink into a fit of humility and silence like a normal human, the WCFG doubles down on the call for brains.  They called the “revelation” that people in the DA’s office have a right to their opinion and to exercise their franchise “ample cause to scream bloody murder.”  Srsly!

Further, the WCFG gave their email zombie hordes the names of their targets.  I will not name them here because, believe it or not, I am a human being, but WCFG flat-out says, here are two people, two women, their full names and titles, and they signed the recall.  They stopped just short of sending a map to these women’s homes–I guess to suggest that despite all appearances to the contrary there is no Republican war on women!–but the implication was clear.  These two are now enemies of the state, gawdless mercenary apostates who need to be dealt with.

Walker and his team could have politely asked for assurances that these women were not involved in handling John Doe documents.  Reasonable people could have suggested that DA Chisholm reassign these women to another unit.  Instead, the WCFG email accuses these women of, I Kid You Not, “active involvement in a political coup.”  Enemies of the state!  Zombie Joe McCarthy!

Personally, I would like to call on DA Chisholm to assign these women extra security for the foreseeable future.  There are zombies now after their brains.