Monday, November 2, 2009

Accountability And Consistency Are Foreign Concepts To Scott Walker

Two years ago, an inmate named Freddie Dudley allegedly escaped from the Community Correctional Center and killed another man. Scott Walker acted quickly to make sure "accountability" was enforced. He felt compelled to, since he was up for re-election in the spring.
His idea of "accountability" was to fire four corrections officers.

The only problem was, the officers didn't do anything wrong. But because of Walker's grandstanding, it still took them the better part of a year to get their jobs back. Walker's politicking cost at least one officer his home and custody of his children.

About the same time that the wrongly-fired officers were getting their jobs back, it became obvious to anyone that the then Superintendent of the House of Correction, Ron Malone, was not up to the task of being the Superintendent. Malone oversaw a host of problems stemming from an inmate being allowed to die from a drug overdose, to not even knowing the policy in his own facility to horribly failing a federal audit.

Malone clearly deserved to be fired, or at the very least not be reappointed to the job, since it was just a few months after Walker's re-election. Despite this overwhelming amount of evidence of Malone's incompetence, Walker nominated him for re-appointment.

More recently, just earlier this month, as part of an ongoing series of stories in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel regarding child care fraud, it was discovered that a woman who was suspected of defrauding the system was given another check in the amount of $25,000, Walker immediately stepped up and fired the administrator of the program, no questions asked.

But like with the correction officers, it was found that the county worker was not to blame and that she was returned quietly to her position.

This brings us up to now.

Last week, it was revealed that one of Walker's cabinet members, John Chianelli failed to do his job with the slightest bit of competence or diligence. The end result was a sudden $3 million shortfall in the current budget. Cory Liebmann points out that this was only the very tip of a large iceberg, and shows us a larger portion of Chianelli's long record of failures.

Now, given Walker's past behaviors, one would have expected him to take immediate action to show that he wants to run a lean, efficient government. This is especially true since he has the high aspiration to be governor someday.

But one would have been wrong. Walker has not said one thing about Chianelli's failure, much less taken any sort of action. However, Walker did try to take it out on innocent county workers and the citizens they provide services for, by laying off 180 workers.

This is a major failure on Walker's part, and shows that he is not really in possession of any leadership qualities.

As Cory so clearly puts it:
The bottom line is that someone must own the incompetence that has been demonstrated at the Behavioral Health Division. Scott Walker appointed John Chianelli to his current position and who knows, maybe Chianelli is just doing Walker's bidding out there. But if he is acting completely on his own then Scott Walker must hold him accountable. If he is unwilling to do so then Scott Walker is essentially volunteering to take ownership of that incompetence himself. And goodness knows that he has plenty of that all on his own.

4 comments:

  1. He thought that laying off some county workers who had nothing to do with the budget error was enough to show a tough response. Too bad that didn't pan out for him.

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  2. Anonymous-

    Is that you, Scott Walker?

    Janet,

    You are correct. The lay offs were just a ploy to make him look tough and take attention from his own screw ups. Both failed, as usual.

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  3. i can't believe it but scott walker is a bigger goof than i thought he was.when will everyone wake up and expose this guy for what he is.

    ReplyDelete