[img_assist|nid=129354|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=155|height=156]We listen to WTMJ-AM right-wing talk radio, so you don't have to.
Today, on the way home from voting, we caught the top of the Milwaukee radio station's afternoon Jeff Wagner Show. Wagner, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is a milder sounding but no less reactionary version of the station's morning screamer, right-wingman Charlie Sykes. Wagner launched right into a very earnest-sounding lecture about the Walker recall petition signatures.
According to Wagner, who apparently is broadcasting from another dimension, there's just no way the recall gatherers collected about one million signatures to recall Walker, as the recall campaign United Wisconsin has said. In fact, Wagner claimed the number is hugely inflated. And how does Wagner know that to be the case? Because the Government Accountability Board and the recall campaign itself have not provided an exact number of total signatures. Which, of course, neither are obliged to do.
Wagner's further reasoning was rather vague and unclear, unlike his smooth intonation. For instance, the Walker campaign has huge sums of money and a reported 3,000 volunteers with which to check the complete set of the petitions it was given weeks ago, and it has spent weeks creating a database of the signatures. Yet it apparently has not figured out how to count, or at least it never occurred to Wagner to ask the campaign for its own computerized tally. If this represents the efficiency with which the Walker administration runs the state, then we really are in big trouble.
Never mind that the Walker campaign recently told a judge that it had reviewed around a quarter million signatures but needed additional weeks of time to finish looking at the rest.
The court turned down that request, but if we take it at face value, this Walker campaign assertion is strong circumstantial evidence that, in fact, the petition signatures number well into the hundreds of thousands.
Summed up, it's more of your typical, Republican cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, says radio hitman Wagner, there's no way the recall campaign gathered a million signatures to recall Walker.
On the other hand, poor, poor Scott Walker is so beseiged with petition papers that despite weeks of heavy effort, he's barely scratched the surface of reviewing the full list, although his campaign as of last count already had looked at a quarter million.
Which is it? Not enough signatures or way too many? Well, in the right-wing-o-verse, this is sort of like the Doublemint Twins. It's two contradictory ideas, all wrapped up into one! The recall campaign is a breath freshener! No, it's a floor wax! No, it's both!
Of course, Wagner's real purpose evidently wasn't to find out the exact total, but rather to cast doubt among the faithful by implying there may not really be enough signatures to recall the governor. Never mind that recall is an eventuality even some Republican officials openly regard as certain.
We turned off the Wagner program upon pulling into our garage, just after another listener called in to agree with Wagner and wonder aloud how there could possibly be so many reported signers. After all, the caller said, things seem to going pretty well in Wisconsin. Whoops, even more cognitive dissonance! Someone call physicist Stephen Hawking; I think we've found proof of an alternate universe, peopled exclusively by conservatives who think Walker is great and it's working in Wisconsin.