Once upon a time, there was a conservative Wisconsin blogger who didn't fit the mold. He was funny, and could even poke a little fun at the right wing and Republicans once in awhile. His name was Dennis York, and he had quite a following.
Eventually people figured out that Dennis York was simply a name de blog, and his real identity became a subject of a lot of Internet speculation. When he finally surfaced -- to end the blog and take a job with the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy -- it was as Christian Schneider, a Capitol aide to a Republican legislator. It even made Madison TV news.
Dennis York and I had had a cordial relationship,some fun sparring online via our blogs, and sometimes a few back channel e-mails. Schneider and I even had lunch when he went public and I wished him well as he began his new role as propagandist for WPRI, which poses as an independent policy think tank while promoting right-wing Republican causes and candidates.
I've been missing Dennis lately. His alter ego, Christian, seems to have pretty much lost his sense of humor since he drank the WPRI Kool-Aid and started cashing their paychecks. It's not that he's humorless, but he's nowhere near as funny as when he felt free to write things anonymously that the GOP would have not found amusing.
He's also a regular contributor to National Review Online now, pretty heady stuff. I suspect William F. Buckley Jr. would wince at much of what appears there, and not just from Schneider.
This is the kind of "insight" that now passes as commentary from Schneider on WPRI: The summer recall elections, in which Democrats unseated two incumbent Republican state senators, "signified nothing at all."
Or this claim,in which he dismisses the idea that Walker would not have been elected if he had told the truth about his union-busting plans:
Finally, would Walker really have not been elected had he proposed to limit union bargaining during the campaign? Face it, he would have won.
And yet Walker isn’t being excoriated for going back on a promise; he’s being criticized simply for something he didn’t say. (Incidentally, plenty of unions were telling their members during the campaign that Walker was going to roll back their ability to bargain.) As if campaigns are measured, cautious affairs, where candidates put forth their plans and voters carefully measure each morsel of fiscal policy contained therein.
What Walker hid from the voters was not some small morsel of policy that wasn't worth a mention. It was a radical idea that touched off months of protests by hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites -- many of whom had mistakenly voted for Walker -- and resulted in the recalls. That battle is not over. Polling early this year suggested that in a re-run of last November's election, knowing what they now know, voters would have elected Tom Barrett, not Scott Walker.
Dennis York might have had a wry comment or two about the FBI's battering ram on Cindy Archer's front porch. Christian Schneider, however, is too busy writing at National Review Online about Robin Vos's beer baptism. Buckley must be a whirling dervish in his grave.
We miss you, Dennis.