It's some gall this conservative jack-wagon has trying to re-write the legacy of Robert M. La Follette and his progressive policies in Wisconsin. Mr. Schneider does provide a history lesson that many people who aren't students of history probably should know, one of them being the fact that progressives did often times support eugenics. However, Mr. Schneider is way, wayyyyyyy off trying to compare UW President Charles Van Hise's support of the practice to also being Governor/Senator La Follette's, and thereby a position of 2012 progressives who look to him as the forefather of their movement. I haven't found a 2012 progressive who hails La Follette and supports eugenics, but I could be wrong. That's like saying a Tea Partier who adamantly supports one of our Founding Father's positions is also a supporter of slavery. There may be some out there, but let's be honest, 100 or 200 years have taught humanity a few things about human rights. (Ever hear of WWII Mr. Schneider?)
Look, I'm only one human being, and I can't go on at length to fully refute everything that was written. He goes on at length trying to make comparisons between liberal policies and the progressive tradition of La Follette picked up by people like Gaylord Nelson. He constantly is railing against teachers, public sector unions, public employees in general... essentially people who have decided to help people and be paid a living wage.
It was at the end where I flipped. That's where he did something that really pissed me off. He essentially said that as someone who calls myself a progressive, I don't really know about La Follette, and in turn, Wisconsin history. Yes, Mr. Schneider ends his article talking about how La Follette rose to power (missing his turn in the Congress during the 1880's, instead perpetuating the fallacy that La Folette's history starts in 1900), the way he pulled the strings of government to get what he wanted, and how many of his reforms were achieved and progressives focused on keeping them in place.
This may make some people angry, but I got really pissed. Why? Because I just finished reading The History of Wisconsin: The Progressive Era - 1893-1914 by John Buenker, which is almost 700 well researched pages of source cited information and statistics which go on at length about many issues Mr. Schneider brings up. Things like, prohibition, which nationally many progressives championed, but was polarizing among Wisconsin's faction. He tries to implicate La Follette as a prohibitionist, but reading Mr. Buenker's book, one finds that La Follette was a master at side-stepping the issue and was a "wet".
Look, I can take it when a conservative or Neo-Stalwart calls me out because I can't cite a statistic, or if we philosophically disagree on how government should be organized. What I can't stand, is a jerk-off misconstruing well documented history in a lengthy article and providing absolutely no source work, because his revisionist history is made up of strung along tangents and false equivalencies. I call that bull-shit.
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