Today in Chicago (photo: Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt/flickr)

It’s been a pretty depressing weekend, watching our home-grown Gestapo engaging in mass arrests and drearily familiar trumped-up charges of “terrorism” in Chicago even as heroic Mayor of Newark (and supposed Democrat) Cory Booker  goes on TV to, you guessed it, anguish fretfully over the tender feelings of equity fund billionaires like those at Bain Capital, and how it’s just so “nauseating” for the Obama campaign to target them for criticism.  Not, of course, doing anything to them.   But it still hurts, and Booker joins the Village in feeling their pain.

Then we find that Wisconsin’s largest newspaper, the pathetic Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, managed to squeeze out an editorial supporting Scott Walker against those who would recall his crooked, lying ass.  Presumably, they did so with a big burrito the night before and coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, because this one was messy.  Just like the Oregonian here, the J/S, even in its depleted state, is still prone to taking on crusades and can sometimes be irritatingly successful at it; Walker is clearly one of their crusades.

After an at least glancingly accurate analysis of Walker’s record, which they can’t help but admit has been “divisive” and not all that successful, they quickly resort to slippery slope arguments to justify his continuation in office, even adopting some of his talking points to do so.  Given the strife-ridden record of most metropolitan newspapers and their unions, the J/S is not unique in its reflexive embrace of union-busters, but its casual assumption that union-busting is a universal value mocks reality, and calling it a point in Walker’s favor only shows how few others there are.

Never mentioned, of course, are the pathologically grabby billionaires funding the likes of Walker or Romney and dictating their every move.  I can’t get inside the head of the lady from Wisconsin who couldn’t sleep at night knowing some fireman somewhere was getting a pension, and thus gave Walker a half million bucks to put a stop to it, but even if I worked at the Journal/Sentinel I would hesitate to so eagerly take her side.  I also heard the famous taped conversation between a fawning and credulous Walker and someone he thought was another rich, crazy person to whom he owed his career, David Koch.  Did the crack team of editors at the J/S all plug their ears and sing “Frere Jacques” while their state was being sold out, lock stock, and barrel so flagrantly?

Sadly, no.  Like the rest of the media, the J/S is simply sticking to its story, even more so because it was wrong the first time, and hoping to thus paper over its failures.  The missing job growth in Wisconsin becomes the missing WMD in Iraq, which looks an awful lot like the missing trillions on Wall Street. Poof.  No one could have predicted, and all that.

Back in the Commie days, we used to make fun of the laughably implausible “explanations” for obvious government failure that would pour out of Soviet media in response to one disaster or another.  Now, we have the same thing here, but for reasons I can’t fathom lots of people continue to think otherwise.  What’s new, and much more disturbing, is the other things we’ve adopted from the Soviets, which we’re seeing in Chicago today.

On wars, taxation, social services, and almost everything else, the government and media now agree that the majority of Americans are, well, mistaken, and they’re letting us know with their LRAD’s and editorials, respectively.  And why wouldn’t they?  As George Bush said, “History?  We’ll all be dead.”   And for once, he wasn’t lying.