As part of his ongoing project to turn his state into Nicaragua under the Somozas, Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, got together with his pet legislature and blew up the state's non-partisan Government Accountability Board in favor of a terrarium for political cronies. The first inhabitants were installed this week and, boy howdy, one of them is a real pip.

Former Rep. Pat Strachota, R-West Bend, was Vos' pick for the ethics panel and RNC member Steve King of Janesville his choice for the elections panel. On June 30, the new partisan panels will replace the outgoing Government Accountability Board, whose members are nonpartisan. The transition was triggered by a law passed by GOP lawmakers and signed by Gov. Scott Walker in December. Strachota was a state representative from 2005-2015 and was Wisconsin's first female Assembly Majority Leader. King is founder and partner of King Capital, LLC, and is on the Board of Directors for First Community Bank, Milton and the National Boy Scouts of America.

Oh, there's more to Steve King than that, and what is it about politicians named Steve King anyway? His career began in a city called Washington in a time long ago, when men were men, and some of them were breaking into office buildings and covering up and delivering money in brown paper bags to people in phone booths. Ah, thim was the days!

Anyway, back then, this Steve King worked as a security man for the Committee To Re-Elect The President, and his gig was to keep tabs on Martha Mitchell, the obstreperous wife of criminal-bastard Attorney General John Mitchell. Ms. Mitchell did some drinking and she kept calling reporters and threatening to blow all kinds of whistles on all kinds of people. She and John were in California when the burglars got busted in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. John went back to Washington and Martha went off the rails. It was this Steve King who was tasked with keeping her away from anyone who might be interested in the tales she had to tell. What went on remains murky, but, in her autobiography, Martha Mitchell told a hair-raising tale of what happened. She'd also told the tale to a reporter from McCall's in July of 1973.

But it did not work out that way. In the kind of protective custody in which she was held in the California motel, it was not until Thursday afternoon that Martha managed to call Helen Thomas at UPI to say that she was determined to get her husband out of politics. The conversation ended "abruptly when it appeared that somebody had taken the phone from her hand," Miss Thomas wrote. Reached at their Watergate apartment, John Mitchell expressed "amusement" at his wife's turning to her trademark, the telephone, and assured the reporter of his intention to get out of politics after the election.

At the motel, Steve King, the security agent, has indeed wrenched the telephone out of Martha's hand, and within the next few days he yanks it out of the wall, destroys it, holds Martha down on a bed while a doctor he has summoned gives her a tranquilizing shot and sees to it that no more of her outgoing calls will be taken by the motel switchboard. Martha is a prisoner during that first week of the Watergate mess, and there is every reason to believe that, as she said later, "they left me there with no information" and "they were afraid of my honesty."

Several days later she arrived at her old haven, the Westchester Country Club, to issue her famous second blast, "I am a prisoner.... I won't stand for this dirty business," and to detail the allegedly brutal treatment that she said left her black and blue and required stitches at a Los Angeles Hospital.

Martha Mitchell's story was denounced at the time as the ravings of a madwoman. King has tap-danced a sort of denial about his role in this weird episode down through the years, but it's a measure of what Scott Walker has wrought in Wisconsin that Martha Mitchell's former minder has a job policing the state's political ethics. Our old friend, Clio, Muse of History, also known by her Marvel Comics superhero name The Proclaimer (!), reminds us that she's still on the case.

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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