Scott Walker is dangerous to America and the world

Scott Walker photo by Gage Skidmore (Wikipedia)

Republican Gov. Scott Walker continues traveling the world at Wisconsin’s expense in an attempt to build fake foreign policy credentials for his unannounced but ridiculously obvious presidential campaign.

As Walker left for his latest taxpayer-funded vacation to Germany, France and Spain, he promised to continue the policy he began on his recent $138,000 trip to Great Britain of not saying anything abroad that would indicate he was gaining any knowledge about the world.

“I’m old school,” Walker said. “I don’t think any elected official…with regards to the president should be talking about foreign affairs, at least [not] publicly on foreign soil.”

That’s a pretty strange old school Walker attended. He may not have graduated from that one either.

Because as soon as Walker returns to this country he’s always eager to condemn every single action ever taken around the world by the president.

That includes the historic deal the United States recently negotiated in partnership with five other major world powers—Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Walker’s ‘Foolish’ about Iran Deal

It’s exactly the kind of life-and-death global issue that illustrates how incredibly dangerous it would be to elect as president of the United States a small-time Midwestern governor who knows next to nothing about world affairs.

Walker recently promised publicly that on Day One of his imaginary presidency he would immediately kill the negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran, the rest of the world be damned.

From the moment Obama became the first African American ever to assume the presidency, Republicans adopted the openly racist narrative that he was just not up to the job.

That gave them license to try to sabotage every single major accomplishment of Obama’s presidency, including creating millions of jobs needed to end the second worst American economic crisis in history, extending health care to millions of Americans who couldn’t afford it and, now, negotiating the first world pact to stop a hostile nation from developing nuclear weapons.

Despite the Republicans’ brazen anti-Americanism, Obama succeeded in every one of those achievements and won re-election to boot.

But Republican presidential candidates still haven’t been able to stop themselves from opposing everything President Obama does even when it’s clearly good for America and the rest of the world.

That’s why when Obama was asked on National Public Radio about Walker’s promise to immediately destroy the world agreement shutting down Iran’s nuclear weapons program as president, the real president sounded like someone trying to explain the world to a child.

“It would be a foolish approach to take,” Obama said. “And, you know, perhaps Mr. Walker, after he’s taken some time to bone up on foreign policy, will feel the same way.”

The reason is obvious to anyone not totally blinded by Obama hatred.

If Republicans see something wrong with a world agreement preventing nuclear weapons in Iran closely monitored and enforced by the world’s six most powerful nations, how would the world be safer without that agreement, enforced with guaranteed monitoring and international muscle, leaving Iran totally free to develop all the nuclear weapons it could ever launch as fast as it possibly could?

Automatic Republican opposition extends their false narrative portraying Obama as an incompetent national leader easily bamboozled by smarter, craftier Iranian negotiators.

But with Walker traveling first to Britain and now to France and Germany, it’s a little awkward telling the British, French and Germans that their own national leaders also are totally naïve, incompetent, easily hoodwinked simpletons.

That’s why Walker tries to follow the advice attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.”

But in London Walker looked ridiculous when refusing to answer questions about anything except cheese before an audience of foreign policy experts at a world-renowned British think tank.

Upon his return, The Washington Post reported Walker immediately began packing his calendar with tutoring sessions from so-called Republican foreign policy experts, a sort ofCliffsNotes crash course on world affairs.

But Walker has always been described as an indifferent student. It takes more than giving Walker homework on how to pronounce funny foreign names and taxpayer-funded field trips to make him an intelligent student of foreign affairs.

The Republican default position is to talk up going to war to please the nation’s angriest, meanest voters, otherwise known as the Republican base. But few Republican presidents—except for the last one—have understood so little about the world that they were actually eager to start wars.

But Walker is a man who compares schoolteachers and nurses democratically and peacefully demonstrating against salary cuts to ISIS terrorists and boasts about how he “dropped the bomb” on public employees.

It would be hard to imagine anything more dangerous for the U.S. or the world than giving that man the power to start dropping real ones.

Editor’s Note: This column is reprinted with permission from the Shepherd Express, which appeared in Milwaukee’s alternative publication under the headline ‘Scott Walker Vs. The World.’

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Joel McNally

Joel McNally is a national-award-winning Wisconsin journalist based in Milwaukee. Joel previously worked as a reporter and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal, where his column was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and he won a National Headliners Award for best local column. He is a contributing writer at Milwaukee’s alternative newspaper, Shepherd Express.