Friday, April 6, 2012

Scott Walker IS A Conservative Without A Conscience!

Two weeks ago, I brought the gentle reader's attention to an article written by John Dean, which questioned whether Scott Walker is a "Double High," or a person who is amoral, bullying, power-grabbing sociopath with followers who are submissive to him but belligerent to others.

Dean has now answered his own question.  The answer is an unsurprisingly resounding yes.  Dean states that Walker meets all of the qualifiers to be thus labelled. Here is a tasty tidbit from his findings on Walker's amorality:
To be amoral, of course, is to be insensitive to moral matters. A politician like Scott Walker will wrap himself in a cloak of morality, while, in fact, acting anything but morally.

Needless to say, Walker’s policies that attack poor women by cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood; his slashing of education budgets while giving tax breaks to wealthy corporations; and his pursuit of similar radical Republican actions all raise serious moral issues. But different people have different moral standards and views of such activity, so I have excluded these matters from this discussion.

Similarly, I have set aside the fact that a growing number of Walker’s closest aides are being criminally investigated and several have been charged with, or pled guilty to, crimes stemming from actions that occurred during Walker’s tenure as Milwaukee County Executive. Walker has hired several high-powered criminal defense lawyers and is building a legal defense fund, but this, too, is not relevant at this time, for little is known of this secret “John Doe” grand jury proceeding. Walker has not been charged. The grand jury proceeding simply remains a dark cloud following him, and no conclusions can or should be drawn from it.

Nonetheless, Walker’s amorality is conspicuous. It is found in his history of ethics violations and the record of his lying. A lengthy article could (and should) be written about both, but suffice it here to note that his ethics problems go back to his Marquette University days, when the college newspaper called him “unfit” for student office.

Later, in the Assembly (in 2005), Walker would earn the distinction of receiving the second-highest fine for an ethics violation in Wisconsin history. His lying is notorious. Politifacts Wisconsin (which I am told is more reliable than most of these sites) finds Walker to be an accomplished falsifier. With respect to 44 statements that Politifacts examined, Walker was found to have been truthful only on six occasions. The fact that 38 statements were pants-on-fire false, false, mostly false, or half-truths is stark evidence of amorality.

I watched a video of a Walker speech at the Goldwater Institute. He’s slick: Fast-talking, confident, and dishonest—I watched him distort facts with which I was familiar. He spoke in mostly half-truths, and certainly not with the kind of candor that the late Senator Goldwater expected from political figures.

Coincidentally, in an indirect way, Dean also advocates that one reads Cognitive Dissidence and share the information learned from these writings:
Hopefully, one or more social scientists or political psychologists in Wisconsin, where there are many, will step forward and tell the people of Wisconsin more about what they have on their hands, with Scott Walker as their governor. In fact, the June 5, 2012 election is a true opportunity to discourage another leader who is a conservative without conscience, for these leaders always have a healthy following. Altemeyer estimates that about twenty-five percent of the population has, in varying degrees, the disposition to follow a double high authoritarian, many blindly or simply because it assuages their fears. And, of course, these are aggressive followers who can attract others who are unaware of the nature of the person they are electing, thus enabling an authoritarian leader like Walker to gain ever-growing control.

Good luck, Wisconsin.
We got just under sixty days to get this done and save our state, literally. Let's get crackin'!

5 comments:

  1. Do you have any idea what the 2005 violations mentioned in the report were about? Wasn't Walker already County Exec at that time, not in the Assembly?

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    1. Ah, I remember getting one of those robocalls in 2005 and reporting it -- and I remember his weak excuses. Who knew that those were the good old days, before he destroyed Milwaukee and Wisconsin? Had I known, I would have sold up during the housing boom and would be long gone from this misery.

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  2. Fascinating; thanks.

    Word also is that Walker ran into problems at Marquette University even earlier than at that early end for him after his unethical campaign for student government. (Really, isn't it too telling when a guy cheats even to win in student government? You could not make up this stuff.) Let's hope that more comes out about that, for more insights into his odd character -- or lack thereof -- not that anything will dissuade those predisposed to follow a double-authoritarian over the cliff, screaming their hosannas and calling it not a cliff but a test of their true-believerism.

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  3. Well good luck with thinking that true believers are not going to support Walker. They are going to say anything bad about him is just pro-union propaganda. Before this year, I would have laughed at that idea, now, we know they will say that.

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