Walker Scores A People's Win in Wisconsin

Thoughts on the Great Badger State Brouhaha of 2011:

Wisconsin's average teacher salary is higher than its median household income. And that does not even take into account the teachers' lavish benefits packages; or that they receive such pay and benefits while not working a full year; or that they are practically impossible to fire, no matter how bad they perform. Given all that along with the fact that Wisconsin's voters elected Scott Walker and a Republican legislature specifically to get the state's fiscal house in order, the protesting conglomerate of teachers/unions/liberals/Democrats should have known from the beginning that they could not prevail this year.

Wisconsin's new law prevents its teachers from collectively bargaining on pensions and benefits, but contrary to what the MSM would have you believe, it does not prevent them from collectively bargaining on salary. Meanwhile, federal workers can not collectively bargain at all; fewer than half the states allow their state workers to do so; and American liberalism's biggest icon, FDR, was of the opinion that no government workers should be allowed to collectively bargain -- period. When you think about that, it is both hilarious and horrible that some people have characterized Wisconsin's law as an attack on civil rights.

Something else that goes in the "both hilarious and horrible" basket is that Wisconsin's Democrat senators, who abandoned their offices and fled the state in an effort to prevent the law from even being voted on, have depicted Republicans of being the ones attacking democracy.

And finally, I am dumbfounded that so many of Wisconsin's teachers seem not to realize (or care) that their protests make them look like petulant preteens throwing a temper tantrum. They sought to preserve their slice of the taxpayers' largess by screaming, scowling, and falsely calling in sick. After Wednesday's vote, they attempted to break the windows of Republican senators' cars as those duly elected senators were driving home. Conspicuously, what they did not do was claim to have produced a crop of above-average students.

Considering the above, it has to be said that the Wisconsin teachers and union reps who descended on the state capital are nothing more than the personification of P.J. O'Rourke's observation that "at the core of liberalism is the spoiled brat -- miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats."

At the risk of sounding childish myself, and even semi-blasphemous, I have to admit that every time I read that quote I am tempted to scream "A-f'ing-men!"