Scott Walker Supports Recall Effort By Serving as His Own Attack Ad

21 October 2011

Dear Scott Walker,

I haven't written you for a few weeks. And I imagine you're thinking, "Oh, I haven't heard from that nice Heather in a while, which makes it difficult for me to know exactly where I'm going wrong. She must be over me now that she's a big tv star and everything." And it's true, I've been super busy ever since that whole Brian Williams / Ed Schultz business, but my moments of fame were conveniently limited to 15, freeing me up to get other things done and engage in the effort to recall you, which is surprisingly time-consuming. But since it's been a while, I'll just give a greatest hits recap of what I've been up to since I last wrote:

• Helping to organize and preparing to begin Operation Recall on Nov. 15
• Conquering corn mazes, throwing birthday parties, hosting slumber parties, watching Rapunzel movies, running errands, volunteering and other things associated with being a busy parent and contributing member of society.
• Putting on a teacher workshop (on Antigone, if you can believe it. I thought of you all day long. I'm sure you have no idea what Antigone is, but there's a character in it I think you could really relate to. You should put it on your "reading" list. I put "reading" in quotes to indicate that I know you don't read, and unfortunately there's not really a major movie of Antigone that I know of, but you could maybe google it for a synopsis. Synopsis means summary.)
• Pondering whether or not it's actually true, or even possible, that someone as seemingly morally bankrupt and duplicitous as you could have actually received the rank of Eagle Scout. Since you haven't done anything in your adult life to demonstrate your alleged "integrity," you repeatedly hearken back to your Eagle Scout days. All I'm asking is that you produce some proof of that claim. Where's the badge? Why have we never seen a photo of you in the uniform? What was your project? The badgers want to know.
• Planning and promoting a community Voter ID info session with the City Clerk so that the many seniors and others in our town who will be adversely affected by the absurdly wasteful voter id law will be able to exercise their legal right to vote.  Since many of these voters are unable to drive, we're still in need of volunteers to drive people to the DMV, by the way, so if you know anyone in the area who wants to help prevent the disenfranchisement of our most vulnerable voters, please pass on my contact info. I know you share a building with some decent people, so maybe you could mention it to them if you run into anyone at work who cares about preserving democracy and they could get in touch.
• Enjoying the vindication of having been part of the investigation that led to Politifact calling you out on your lie that you've never said anything negative about teachers.
• Trying to save our house from foreclosure. (Thanks, by the way, for the helpful cuts that reduced my appointment by 17% and totally destroyed our already frugal budget. Without those cuts, we might be contributing to the economy like we should be right now.)
• Various other writing and work.
• Starting a RECALL WALKER Pumpkin Carving Contest.

So don't worry. I'm not over you at all. I've just been busy. And considering you give us new reasons each day to resist your power-hungry agenda, I don't think you need to worry much that my reasons to write to you will subside before you're recalled. Especially since it has become increasingly clear that you have no intention at all of providing jobs - or tools - to the people who need them in Wisconsin.  On the plus side, this helps our recall effort since you continue to provide us with free publicity by serving as your own attack ad. Let's look at what YOU and your Republican cohort have been up to since I last wrote:

• Fundraising with (or is it for?) your buddies the Koch Brothers
• Wasting our money on the bogus voter id law and thwarting free and open elections (really? I thought you hated wasteful government spending? Talk about lack of fiscal responsibility!)
• Wasting our time by your joke of a special jobs session on things like making sure kids don't get proper sex education (really? I thought you were anti-abortion? Talk about working against your own agenda!)
• Wasting our money
• Being at the heart of a federal John Doe investigation as more and more people around you are granted immunity
• Fundraising (and lying)
• Undermining our teachers, stealing from our most vulnerable students and placing more limits every day on their resources (really? I thought you were against over-regulation and for education? Talk about hypocrisy!)
• Rolling back efforts to address the chronic wasting disease problem in deer populations
• Passing some dumb law about fertilizer that has nothing to do with jobs
• Fundraising
• Manipulating the law to force through your catastrophic plan to destroy the environment by implementing the proposed mine, a plan that you seem hell-bent to push through despite massive efforts to stop it by the community it will negatively impact forever
• Seeing the results of your asinine deregulation of water standards as Wisconsin communities find themselves having to boil water because their drinking water has been contaminated by fecal matter
• Keeping the unemployment rate nice and high and causing private sector employment to decline (for the third month in a row) (really? I thought you were going to create 250,000 jobs! You're averaging a loss of about 20,000 a month. At this rate, you'll LOSE us 250,000 jobs before your term is over. Good thing we're recalling you!)
• Fundraising (and lying again)

Ok, it's getting late. This partial list will have to do. I missed a lot, but we both know what you've done. And so do the rest of the people in Wisconsin.

Anyway, for all of these reasons, and so many more, I'm still not over your abuses of power and your brazen contention that Wisconsin is for sale while the rest of us are being foreclosed.

And I think it's also worth complaining about, before I sign off, that you still have not replied to one single letter I have written you, even after a distinguished third party read one of them out loud to you on a national stage.  Is there seriously nothing a dissenting constituent can do to get your attention? You don't reply to our letters. You pretend we aren't in the room when we try to address you. You tell people that we don't really exist. And I have to say, it's getting pretty annoying.

Because democracy means you work for us. You work for the people. And if we're your boss, you have to listen to what we have to say even if you hate what we're saying. It's not optional. Democracy means the people matter; they have a voice. And they shouldn't be forced to blow against the wind by writing monologues that everyone but the recipient reads because he's too much of a plutocratic egomaniac to bother with the plebes he pretends to serve.

So the fact that you still refuse to even acknowledge our dissent is, in the end, grounds for dismissal. And I'm afraid it's come to that.  It would be preferable to communication anyway at this point.

Bring on the recall.

Heather DuBois Bourenane
Wisconsin citizen