Milwaukee's 11th District Rep. Mandela Barnes was asked to leave the premises before Scott Walker's announced presidential run at the Waukesha County Expo Center. Why?
None of the possible reasons are good, that's for sure.
1. Was it because he was black?Barnes just wanted to see the announcement, not make a scene or cause a little mischief accepting an invitation to stand on stage with Walker for the event (which he turned down). After all, he is a sitting lawmaker in the Assembly, that's gotta count for something right?
2. Or was it because he was a Marxist Democrat spying on the paranoids that make up the Republican Party?
This should have been the media focus, and we should have gotten an answer from Walker's campaign. How could something like this have happened? The Journal Sentinel's Dan Bice did mention it, but didn't pursue it:
Barnes said he was asked to leave the event once Walker's staff realized who he was. He complained that he had gone "from the top to the bottom before I even knew it." Barnes said he offered a minor protest before agreeing to exit.For Walker and his crew of partisan authoritarian brownshirts, I guess being black - or heaven forbid, a member of the Democratic Party - will not be tolerated in Walker's America.
Barnes may be letting this go, but I'm not, and the party shouldn't sit back and take this abuse either. From the Devil's Advocate's Radio Network podcast, here's how Rep. Mandela Barnes described what happened:
That's not the real story. The bigger story is that the hacks at the Walker campaign wanted Barnes on the stage BECAUSE he's black, because Walker's supporters were so overwhelmingly white. Up until someone else figured out who he was, then.he was asked to leave.
ReplyDeleteAgain, that was the reported story, I agree.
ReplyDeleteMy focus was about the second half of the story, which I found to be even more amazing.