John Dean shows How Not to Write

CounterPunch.org has a total fruitcake leftoid mutant named Alexander Cockburn infecting its masthead. Here's the latest abomination from the forgotten, but not gone turncoat John Dean's keyboard, about the guv of my native state, Scott Walker, who should stay guv of Wisconsin:

In my prior column, drawing on the work of Bob Altemeyer and others, I listed traits that are consistently revealed by social dominators, or authoritarian leaders. To earn this label, a person must show four key traits: (1) they seek to dominate others, (2) they oppose equality, (3) they are desirous of personal power, and (4) they are amoral. News accounts of Scott Walker reveal that he possesses all four of these defining traits, not to mention others in the longer list I set forth in my prior column. Here, however, I will merely note the evidence for Walker’s having a defining social-dominating disposition. (1) Domination. Authoritarian leaders seek to control others; in short, they are social dominators. This is the story of Scott Walker’s life. By age 7, Walker had formed a “Jesus USA” club, which was a mix of his father’s Baptist ministry and his attraction to patriotism. By age 8, he had undertaken a door-to-door fundraising campaign to take charge of purchasing a flag for the village hall of his small Iowa town. As a teen, Walker sought leadership posts, which provide some control, in Boys State and Boys Nation, and became an Eagle Scout. He attended Marquette University (but has no college degree from there or any other school). At Marquette, he was elected to the student senate, and twice sought but failed to get elected president of the student body. He ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly the same year that he lost his bid to be student president at Marquette, losing the Assembly race as well. Since then, Walker has never stopped running. In 1993, he was elected to the State Assembly, where he remained until 2002. In 2002, he sought the post of Milwaukee County Executive, and he held that post until he was elected Governor in 2010. This is the behavior, writ large, of a dominator. {Huh?] (2) Opposition To Equality. The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology(which is searchable) further defines social dominators as “hard, tough, ruthless, and unfeeling toward others, as opposed to compassionate, generous, caring, and altruistic.” There are many examples of Walker’s harsh and uncaring treatment of those whom he does not believe to be entitled to equality. None is more glaring than his intolerance of gays and lesbians. For example, as Governor, he has worked to end Wisconsin’s recognition of the rights of same-sex couples. He fired the law firm defending the state’s domestic-partnership law. And he appointed a woman to the state’s Labor and Industry Review Commission who believes that gays can be harassed in the workplace. One attorney familiar with Walker’s thinking states, “Governor Walker is ideologically opposed to equal rights for gay and lesbian and transgendered people as is everyone in his administration as far as I can tell and they will probably want to take steps to ensure that gay and lesbian and transgendered people do not have equal rights. Everything that Governor Walker is doing is ideological; I don’t see that his administration has any particular respect for the law per se.” [And this attorney's name is?] (3) Desirous Of Personal Power. Scott Walker has been seeking personal power his entire life, and has never stopped reaching for it. Note how Walker has worked not merely to reach higher offices, but also to enhance his power in these offices when he occupied them. For example, as governor, Walker sought to remove civil service jobs, in order to make them political appointments, and thus subject to his control. Most strikingly, he has sought to undercut the public-employee unions so that he would not have to deal with them, thus increasing his power. Often overlooked in Walker’s infamous union-busting “budget-repair bill“ is the power grab to fill three dozen civil-service jobs with political appointees. For instance, the bill politicized and placed under Walker’s control functions like open-records requests, the selection of general counsels for key agencies, and the selection of communications spokespeople in key departments. He has increased his personal power over some fifteen state agencies, and I suspect that he is (or was, depending on the recall vote) just getting started. Walker’s move to break public employee unions is his most notorious personal power play. To try to prevent the union-busting law’s passage, Democratic state senators left Wisconsin, so that the GOP-controlled legislature could not do Walker’s bidding and ram it through. But nevertheless, using dubious parliamentary ploys, the bill was passed by the Senate, making it a done deal. Walker’s push to get this legislation, known as Act 10, passed into law was done in about as authoritarian a fashion as you will ever see, outside of a dictatorship. Part of Act 10 has already been struck down by a federal judge, and, as I noted earlier, the wisdom of Walker’s power play will be tested in the June 5th recall election. (4) Amorality. To be amoral, of course, is to be insensitive to moral matters. A politician like Scott Walker will wrap himself in a cloak of morality, while, in fact, acting anything but morally. Needless to say, Walker’s policies that attack poor women by cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood; his slashing of education budgets while giving tax breaks to wealthy corporations; and his pursuit of similar radical Republican actions all raise serious moral issues. But different people have different moral standards and views of such activity, so I have excluded these matters from this discussion. Similarly, I have set aside the fact that a growing number of Walker’s closest aides are being criminally investigated and several have been charged with, or pled guilty to, crimes stemming from actions that occurred during Walker’s tenure as Milwaukee County Executive. Walker has hired several high-powered criminal defense lawyers and is building a legal defense fund, but this, too, is not relevant at this time, for little is known of this secret “John Doe” grand jury proceeding. Walker has not been charged. The grand jury proceeding simply remains a dark cloud following him, and no conclusions can or should be drawn from it. Nonetheless, Walker’s amorality is conspicuous. It is found in his history of ethics violations and the record of his lying. A lengthy article could (and should) be written about both, but suffice it here to note that his ethics problems go back to his Marquette University days, when the college newspaper called him “unfit” for student office. Later, in the Assembly (in 2005), Walker would earn the distinction of receiving the second-highest fine for an ethics violation in Wisconsin history. His lying is notorious. Politifacts Wisconsin (which I am told is more reliable than most of these sites) finds Walker to be an accomplished falsifier. With respect to 44 statements that Politifacts examined, Walker was found to have been truthful only on six occasions. The fact that 38 statements were pants-on-fire false, false, mostly false, or half-truths is stark evidence of amorality. I watched a video of a Walker speech at the Goldwater Institute. He’s slick: Fast-talking, confident, and dishonest—I watched him distort facts with which I was familiar. He spoke in mostly half-truths, and certainly not with the kind of candor that the late Senator Goldwater expected from political figures. Clearly, Walker has all the traits of a social dominator and authoritarian leader. More strikingly, it is also clear that he is, in fact, what social scientists term a “double high authoritarian.”

John Dean was Legal Counselor in the Nixon White House. Since then, he has held no position other than inconsequential gadfly who occasionally popped up on left-wing TV such as PMSNBC. Methinks the has-been doth protest too much! P.S. I thought they taught law students how to write in law school!