As is often in the case, the story of Taylor Palmisano and her long line of racist tweets has been somewhat lost in translation as it goes from one media outlet to another.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Dan Bice broke the story and correctly reported that Palmisano had been fired for her racist tweets and included two of the most disgusting tweets about Hispanics:
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By the time the story made it to USA today, the above tweets and the key elements of the story was sanitized to this:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker fired a campaign aide for making offensive comments about Hispanics on Twitter.
The Journal Sentinel reports the Republican governor, who is getting buzz as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, axed deputy finance manager Taylor Palmisano on Tuesday for tweets that included comments such as "illegal" and "nobody speaks English." (Note: The "illegal" quote has subsequently been changed to "illegal mex cleaning in the library.")
And AP reported the key elements of the story like this:
In a March 2011 tweet, Palmisano referred as a custodian in a library where she was working as "illegal" and said "turn off your Walkman."Two months earlier she went on Twitter to say "Nobody speaks English" on the bus she was riding after watching Wisconsin play in the Rose Bowl.
This kind of whitewashing will almost certainly lead many to shrug or even cry foul about overly sensitive political correctness, which is an amazing feat considering Bice's original story and considering that Palmisano also had many other racist tweets about Asians and people that she referred to as "half-breeds." These tweets weren't as ugly or mean as the ones above, but still: who actually says "half-breeds"?
And more importantly, in reading through Palmisano's twitter page it is clear that many other members of Walker's staff were regularly communicating back-and-forth via twitter with Palmisano. The notion that they had no idea about Palmisano's racist tendencies doesn't pass the smell test-- especially considering that only a few months ago, another Walker aide was fired for similar social media situation where he called undocumented Hispanics "the Devil" and defended a bumper sticker that advocated hunting and killing of them.
Clearly, there is a very ugly underbelly of racism within the organization and this type of institutional culture starts at the top --with Walker. Keep in mind that this is the same Scott Walker that has made a career of race baiting on issues like welfare reform, voter fraud and a wide variety of criminal issues. In fact Walker, is soooooo comfortable with racist jokes that he not only told one to his staff, but he put the "joke" in his book, where he says, "one of the top ten ways you can identify a public sector union member: You know by having a copy of the Holy Koran on your desk your job is 100% safe."
Walker also regularly appears on conservative talk radio shows that embrace race baiting, including host Mark Belling's program, who has referred to Hispanics on air as "wetbacks," Jerry Bader, who joked that "it's better to be white" and has claimed that Obama is secretly Muslim, and Charlie Sykes, whose website referred to First Lady Michelle Obama as "mooch."
Given this culture, we really shouldn't be surprised that one of Walker's top aides would be so deeply racist that she wouldn't even think twice about putting up such hateful remarks on twitter. Such views are clearly not frowned upon in Walker Land.