Scott Walker Admits to Wanting to Divide Wisconsin

It should be a blockbuster of a revelation. As Wisconsin Gov. Walker prepares to launch his campaign of union-busting under the guise of a budget repair bill, he tells his biggest donor, Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks, that it's his intention to divide Wisconsin. Hendricks, according to the report, has "given $510,000 to the governor's campaign," making her "Walker's single-largest donor and the largest known donor to a candidate in state history."

The exchange was caught on video by filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein, who was documenting the work being done to return jobs to Janesville, an area hard hit by a GM plant closure.


[Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:]

In the video, Hendricks told Walker she wanted to discuss "controversial" subjects away from reporters, asking him:

"Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions -"

"Oh, yeah," Walker broke in.

"- and become a right-to-work?" Hendricks continued. "What can we do to help you?"

"Well, we're going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill," Walker said. "The first step is we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer."


As I say, it should be a blockbuster of a revelation -- whether it'll be received by the media as such is another question. Walker has been so successful at dividing Wisconsin that the local media is a little skittish about covering controversy. The John Doe investigation into Walker's staff, for example, is nowhere near the news dominator it should be -- and that involves a pedophile, for chrissake. Pedophiles are usually local TV news gold. Wingnuts have been trained to believe that any bad news about Republicans is "media bias" -- even when it's absolute provable fact. If they think your coverage is a result of your commie sympathies, they'll switch to another station.

For their part, Walker's office is telling us not to believe our lying eyes. "Governor Walker has made clear repeatedly that he does not have an interest in pushing right-to-work legislation," said Walker spokeswoman Ciara Matthews.

So does that mean Walker was lying to his top donor? Maybe. But his office's denial puts Walker into a position where logic dictates he must be lying to someone. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the lie wasn't told to Diane Hendricks. That's not a well you want to poison.

No, Walker is lying to us. Walker's public argument is one of everyone "working together." His private argument -- told to those few he tells the truth to -- is the exact opposite.

"This is another colossal bait and switch that goes directly to his honesty," Walker's now-official recall opponent Tom Barrett said. "What he claims he is not in favor of publicly, to the person who has made the largest contribution in state history, he says exactly the opposite. You can't trust him."

Well, that's not entirely true. People like a billionaire donor can trust him, because that's who Walker really represents. It's only those who don't have giant pots of money who can't trust Walker.

You know, the vast majority of people in Wisconsin.

-Wisco