...in Madison last Friday and asks the hostess, "Do you serve assholes?" And the hostess says, "No, now get the fuck out."
This isn't a joke but an allegedly true story. Naomi at
Mind Stain insists it's true while right wing turd blogs such as
Politisite and
Badger Blogger insist the restaurant lied about the incident to drum up pro-union business.
Yep. You've probably heard by now that Koch Industries Governor Scott Walker got tossed from a restaurant last Friday night in Madison for "being a nuisance." The eatery is called The Merchant (I know Crooks and Liars took down the name of the restaurant because of all the right wing threats they started getting from goons but, c'mon people, it's the internet. Shit gets cached and nothing disappears forever once you hit that "publish" button.") and they were well within their legal right to not serve a patron. And it wasn't just management but the other patrons who were booing and hissing at him.
Both Laffy at the
Political Carnival and
Digby, following her lead, are suspicious this ever happened. I have every reason to believe it had.
The phone call that the Badger Blogger made to the Merchant is held up as proof that they manufactured the whole thing when in fact they were being noncommittal either way and when the call was accidentally put on speaker, the exchange is virtually unintelligible. But my right wing colleague heard them going on the internet and assumed they wanted to take down their blog post. But they were probably just reading someone else's blog post for the first time.
Plus, the idea that Patrick Sweeney, the restaurant's owner, would willingly lie about kicking out the Governor and opening himself and his establishment up to criticism, bad PR and (typically, in the case of Walker's right wing lunatic supporters) threats just to drum up pro-union business smacks of irresponsibility that I wouldn't readily ascribe to a small business owner in a highly polarized state.
Did Scott Walker get kicked out of a Madison restaurant last Friday night? Between the lies, innuendos and echoed misinformation on both sides, we may never know. Do I believe it happened?
Hell yes, partly because Naomi at Mind Stain brings up some interesting points that leads me to believe that, with all due respect to John Amato, Laffy, Digby and Co., this may have actually happened. Scott Walker is, for many, many reasons, the most despised Governor since Sarah Palin and if any of our nation's 50 governors would get kicked out of an eatery this month, it would be Scott Walker.
You know, the union-busting piece of shit who, like Mubarak,
lost the support of the constabulary. That would be the constabulary that isn't actually affected by the anti-collective bargaining bill. That would be a constabulary led by a man
who's now openly questioning Walker about his "troubling" statements in that phone call when he all but proved his true allegiance: the Koch Brothers. The same constabulary that, instead of kicking out the protesters at 4:00 like the right wing legislature ordered them to, has actually joined them and slept beside them in the state house.
Like the Rude Pundit simply said, it's never a good idea to fuck with unions. I'd amend that to say that the first union you shouldn't fuck with is the fraternal order of the police. Politics is one thing and I'm sure not every single protesting public union member isn't some dirty, hippie, Commie libr'al and that there are likely quite a few right wingers in that crowd (I wish someone would do a survey), perhaps some who even voted for Walker, who gave no hint during his campaign that he would go after unions' half century-old collective bargaining rights.
But when you fiddle fuck around with a person's ability to empower themself, when you say, "Fuck you to your proposed concessions and willingness to collectively and reasonably bargain with my administration", then you're going to make a lot of political enemies out of your own people, let alone the Democrats. In a way, it's like the radicalizing of the Iraqi military after we'd smashed and disbanded them and turned their country into a rubble-strewn wasteland.
Because that's what the Republican Party on both the federal and the state levels want to do to the middle class of any and every political stripe. And, while the MSM stubbornly ignore the public union uprising for the 3rd Sunday in a row (save for Scott Walker's appearance today on
Press the Meat), this is not going to go away.
And like the shaggy dog story epilogue goes, if that asymmetrical, cross-eyed, corporate tool of a cunt Scott Walker never got kicked out of a restaurant, he ought to be and likely will.
