"That's not the observation of some wingnut in search of an idol..."

"... it's from a story by John Dickerson, political reporter for Slate, a publication that not too long ago held a navel-gazing session on the topic of 'Is Slate Too Liberal?'"

Writes Steve Elbow, a reporter for the Madison newspaper the Capital Times, in a piece titled "Scott Walker's Iowa triumph: Is this really getting serious?" Here's what he quoted from Dickerson's "Best in Show/Wisconsin’s Scott Walker outshines the competition in Iowa.":

"Before the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, one Republican activist summed up Gov. Scott Walker’s challenge this way: 'He doesn’t make the flashbulbs go off.' But at the end of the marathon day of speeches before conservatives, the Wisconsin governor emerged as the leading light."

It's weird for people in Wisconsin — or at least in Madison — to see our governor — who's been hounded and belittled for the last 4 years — bursting out onto the national stage and suddenly seeming like the strongest candidate for President.

Elbow mentions some things Rush Limbaugh said about Walker yesterday, but he leaves out the part where Rush rejects the suddenly-last-Saturday template:

"Poll Watcher Militia" was a hoax.

Predictable, of course.

The original page made derogatory statements about liberals and urged people to harass voters who signed the Walker recall petition who were sex offenders, tax dodgers or anyone with an outstanding warrant....

The question is why anyone fell for it, though I'm sure many of those who spread the word about it knew or suspected it was fake but took advantage of the opportunity to manipulate the anti-conservative hatred.

ADDED: The author of the linked Capital Times article, Steven Elbow, commenting in his own thread, tries to make up for his gullibility by saying that whoever put up the page was trying to encourage other people to harass people who had signed the Walker recall petition:

The author of the “militia” webpage knows that airing his ugly views is risky – drawing outrage from anyone with a sense of fairness and decency, and causing embarrassment to those who share those views but have to walk that thin line between the mainstream and the extreme to maintain their political credibility. So instead of putting his name behind his views, he airs them anonymously. Whether he considers it a hoax or not is irrelevant. The page espouses the views of its creator. More worrisome is it taps into that dark current of hate that drives today’s politics, normalizing threats, violence and racism. And that scares people. That’s why this story was reported, and why it resonated with readers.

Elbow is making a big assumption! We don't know who put up the webpage, so we can only speculate why that person did it. It's at least as likely that a Walker hater put the website up in a scheme to propagate the opinion that conservatives are out to suppress the vote. It's also possible that it was a "pure" troll, committed to neither side, but hoping to get some fun out of watching lefties and righties go at each other. Isn't that what the use of the "Trollface" meme tends to mean? (You have to click through Elbow's link to the Facebook page to see the deployment of that stock cartoon laughing face.)