Ginning up Fear...FEAR!!!!

You’d think there was a summer thundershower coming, the way they were ginning up fear on WIBA-AM Wednesday afternoon. (That’s a poke at the local weather mavens, who act like Chicken Little every time the sky clouds up around here.)

I had to take a break from my “day job” as a producer for Public News Service to run a quick errand. I’d just finished writing a story about how, buried in the excesses of the Budget Repair Bill, is an item that would impact the way Medicaid is run here in Cheesetopia (as my friend Tom Teuber calls it). It’s another Walker power-grab. He wants all the programs under the Medicaid umbrella in Wisconsin to be run by a political appointee (and guess who’d do the appointing) instead of by elected representatives.

These programs impact 1.2 million cheeseheads….that’s one in every five of us. And it’s being lost in the noise appropriately being made about the stripping of collective bargaining rights.

I digress.

I jumped into my huge, foreign-made gas-guzzling SUV and headed down the driveway, then up the hill toward civilization. On the radio, Miss Vicky was braying about the horrible people and leeches soiling “the people’s house”, which she said smelled of pee and patchouli. Then she brought on her guest, that horrible Tea Party woman Leah Vukmir, who used to have Scott Walker’s seat in the Assembly before the dazed and confused people in that Milwaukee neighborhood electified Scotty to be County Exec and electified her to the state Senate.

Before she got into the politics of fear and division, Ms. Vukmir was a Certified Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, a far higher calling than the low life of politics. Senator Vukmir opined that the scene at the Capitol was “bordering on dangerous”, but admitted that so far it had been peaceful. (Implication: at any moment, things could go sideways, and dozens of union thugs would start busting heads.)

She and Miss Vicky went on about how the people up there have put our fair Capitol under siege (Vicky’s characterization) and they’ve milked us dry and it’s about time we put an end to that, by gum. Miss Vicky wanted to know why we couldn’t kick those folks out of the Capitol at 6 PM, and Senator Vukmir offered that if she was in charge, that’s exactly what would happen.

At this point, I arrived at my destination….the grocery store….and went in and committed commerce. When I came out, they were still selling fear and driving wedges, so I pushed the button on my THOUSAND-WATT aftermarket sound system and switched over to a CD of a Toto concert in Paris from 1990.

Selling fear and driving wedges. That’s pretty much all those folks have got these days.