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Thursday, October 13, 2011

Politifact misses again, allowing the Walker Fiction of Outsiders at our Protests.

Let’s be clear. Scott Walker and his merry band of thieves have always pushed the fabrication that the winter protests were due to a bunch of out of staters, outsiders, bused in to agitate and threaten Republican lawmakers. It’s not true. It’s an utter lie.

Yet Politifact let Walker off the hook by accepting that fiction. How easy was it to justify Walker’s lie as fact, check it out below. Politifact wondered if Walker ever called teachers “thugs”:
Scott Walker on Monday, September 26th, 2011 in a television interview … Hannity asked Walker about "mayhem" at the Capitol, which was occupied for weeks by protesters. Hannity specifically mentioned Sen. Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald calling the Capitol "unsafe" for lawmakers trying to get to work, as well as reports of death threats against senators and protests outside Walker’s Wauwatosa house.

Walker answered: "People should not be coming into the state trying to intimidate lawmakers, offer up threats or anything else. That’s just not the way it’s done, at least not in the Midwest. And thankfully, again, our lawmakers stood up to those sorts of thuggery attacks, and we’re not going to allow that here in the state of Wisconsin … But the people coming in from other states, that bring these sorts of tactics, just don’t belong here."

Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said the governor was not talking about teachers when he denounced "thuggery attacks." He said Walker was referring to death threats from out-of-state people.

It was a completely made up story anyone who was there or organized event could tell you. Politifact even took the bait based on conservative media’s “documentation” of those threats. These were threats that were trumped up, exaggerated and the few that were offered up were local individuals who were determined to be harmless. They weren’t outsiders. The media never asked for proof either. Yet…
In our view, it’s clear Walker directed the comment at what he characterized as out-of-state protesters, without specifically mentioning teachers or the teachers union. He didn’t exclude teachers, though … the "thuggery" remark was aimed in part at teachers … and in his "thuggery" comment Walker left room for teachers to assume he was passing judgment on their protests at the Capitol.


Blaming “outsider” was a deliberate way to blame teachers. 

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