The Wisconsin State Journal doesn’t WANNA GO TO SCHOOL and you’re being SO MEAN MAKING US and one of these days OUR REAL MOM WHO’S A PRINCESS WILL COME AND TAKE US AWAY FROM HERE and THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY:

Now that Gov. Scott Walker has said he won’t challenge the estimated 1 million signatures filed against him, let’s move to a recall election as soon as possible.

The threat of an unprecedented recall attempt against Wisconsin’s governor has loomed long enough. It has complicated the state’s already mangled politics and made it difficult to get even small things done at the state Capitol.

Let’s get this thing over with, accept the result and move on.

That’s an editorial in a major mainstream newspaper, by the way, basically saying we’re sick of democracy and covering shit and doing our jobs and working every day. It’s tiresome, the exercise of constitutionally protected rights. It’s exhausting, having to sit around all day writing about it and working on it and paying attention to it. It’s too much. Can’t we just watch TV? I wanna watch TV.

All reporters have stories they’re sick of covering. I’m sure all politicians have things about the political process they wish they didn’t have to do. We all have days we hate our jobs, really. You know what most people do in these situations? THEY SUCK IT UP AND GET ON WITH IT. They don’t write 12 inches of whining crap about how terribly difficult and inconvenient it’s been to have to do stuff, because absolutely no one cares.

No doubt those actually affected by Walker’s policies are bone-tired as well, and would like to “get this thing over with,” to quote the profound headline given this self-indulgent garbage. No doubt those whose jobs and health care and lives are endangered by Walker’s policies would just as soon none of this was happening. Nowhere is their suffering rated higher than that of the poor journalists and politicians whose overwhelming desire to “get things done in the state capitol” has been compromised by the inconvenience of those who dare to fight back.

And in their oh-so-detached-and-objective defense of apathy, the paper’s editorialists even get the basic facts wrong:

We aren’t fans of the recall process — regardless of the target. Voters elected Walker 16 months ago to a four-year term, not a trial run.

Actually, Walker was elected under the terms of the state constitution of Wisconsin, which allows for just such a process as is occurring right now. If “the voters” really elected Walker for four years, about a million of them wouldn’t have signed petitions saying he and his fellow ten-a-penny fascisti should am-scray with all appropriate speed. It’s so annoying for the self-appointed Voices of Reason when the actual voters don’t mirror in action the Noble American People that exist in the editorial board members’ heads.

You know, when I first started blogging way back in the dark ages of 2003 people would ask what the difference was between traditional newspaper writing, which I’d done before, and what I was doing now. And I always said it was a matter of passion. So many, many people writing on the Internet seemd to get that we all had skin in the game, and that the powerless deserved an advocacy equal to the very measure of our strength. Who’s in charge and how they vote mattered, it mattered terribly, and the who’s-up-who’s-down reporting of too many major establishment outlets didn’t convey that in the slightest. People were angry and afraid, and their plight was covered as if it was a game, and the outcome as inconsequential. I could not come up with a better example of this than the editorial linked above.

To the Wisconsin State Journal, all of this is just a big ironic joke, and they’re tired of waiting for the punch line.

A.

x-posted at First Draft