How long is it going to take before politicians figure out exactly what videotape does? And how the Intertoobz work? And the fact that newspapers have these things called "archives" wherein people in 2012 can find out what you previously may have written? Willard Romney seems to be particularly ill-prepared for this part of the modern technological age in which we live. He seems to believe that he can go anywhere he wants in 2012, saying anything he wants about what he did about health-care in Massachusetts when he was governor here, and that there's nobody anywhere equipped with any kind of device that can summon up what he said previously so as to help him look extremely foolish?

Someone else with the same problem is Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. This week, a tape has emerged in which Walker told the editorial board of the Oshkosh Northwestern shortly before his election in 2010 that he had every intention of negotiating with the state's public employee unions. Once in, of course, Walker rammed through a bill eliminating the rights of those same unions to bargain collectively, touching off the firestorm that may yet consume his career as governor. Here's the salient passage, as excavated by the folks at Uppity Wisconsin:

Editorial Board Member: Before, we were talking about state employees contributing to their plan, paying their share of the pension plarn. Collective bargaining come into that?

Walker: Yep (nodding yes)

Editorial Board Member: How do you get that negotiated and accepted by the state employee unions?

Walker: You still have to negotiate it. I did that at the county as well.

(This is a feature, not a bug, with people of the GOP midwest gubernatorial class. Mitch Daniels said he had no intention of making Indiana a right-to-work state, and then he did. John Kasich was similarly mum during his campaign about his plans to demolish collective bargaining for everyone in Ohio.)

Elsewhere, Walker took a real defeat on Tuesday in the Wisconsin state senate when Republican defector named Dale Schultz joined with Democrats and helped kill one of his pet projects — handing over some of the state's most pristine natural wilderness to iron mining interests. The company, Gogabec Taconite LLC, announced that it was pulling out of the project and Republican leaders in the state senate said that the proposal was dead, at least in part because many of them have to go home and fight recall elections of their own that are part of the general effort to recall Walker.

But Scott Fitzgerald said it would be hard to secure votes at that stage because recall campaigns against him and three other Senate Republicans will be gearing up. That could further politicize an already contentious issue, he said.

Scott Walker? A political liability? Unpossible!

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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