Scott Walker: This Is What Passes For A GOP Presidential Candidate

Right now, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is leading the pack of GOP candidates for the presidency in 2016. He’s ahead of Huckleberry; he’s ahead of Krispy Kreme; he’s even ahead of Bush 3.0. So, let’s take a minute and look at Scott Walker and the kind of man he is, and the kind of president he might be if we get so unlucky next year.

At the Iowa Freedom Summit last month, Walker spoke, er, lied, about the education system in his state. After introducing Megan Sampson as the 2010 Wisconsin Outstanding Teacher of the Year, he told the crowd that she had been laid off from her first teaching job because of the seniority system of the state’s public schools and not, not, on the massive cuts to the education budget that he supported and signed into law.

Bad enough, right? That lie? But that wasn’t the only lie Walker told about teachers in his state. One other teacher, Claudia Klein Felske, was taken aback by what Walker had said about the seniority system and also about Sampson being the 2010 Outstanding Teacher of the Year because that is also a lie.

The 2010 Outstanding Teacher of the Year was, in fact, Claudia Klein Felske. And what’s even better than catching Walker in a pair of blatant, ridiculous, lies, is that she also happens to be a former classmate of Walker’s at Marquette University. So, she wrote him a letter, calling him out for his ‘misremembering’ — that is the new politically correct term for lying you know — and noted the irony in the idea that a man who never graduated college is attacking education:

Dear Governor Walker:

I was both surprised and bewildered last week when I saw a news clip of you stumping in Iowa about Megan Sampson, whom you called “The [2010] Outstanding Teacher of the Year in my State.” This was baffling to me since in 2010, I was named Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year … In a most humbling ceremony, we were each surprised at our respective schools by State Superintendent Tony Evers and later honored at the State Capital as the Wisconsin Teachers of the Year.

And so, as one of the bonafide 2010-2011 Wisconsin Teachers of the Year, I feel the need to engage in one of the most valuable skills we teach our students, critical analysis.

Verified by multiple news sources, it turns out that Megan Sampson did win an award in 2010, but it was the Nancy Hoefs Memorial Award given by a relatively small organization of Wisconsin English teachers (WCTE) for “an outstanding first year teacher of language arts.”

…

You failed to mention these details as you used Sampson’s lay-off from her first year teaching position as an opportunity to bash Wisconsin schools on the national stage. You blamed the seniority system for Sampson’s lay-off when, in good conscience, you should have done some serious soul searching and placed the blame squarely on your systematic defunding of public education to the tune of $2.6 billion that you cut from school districts, state aid to localities, the UW-System and technical colleges.

This Wisconsin Teacher of the Year would like to clarify precisely what you’ve done for education.

…

You’ve directed the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to devise content exams that would certify anyone with a degree to become a certified teacher. … Allowing someone to teach without any training in HOW to teach, in effective pedagogy, in student behavior, brain research, motivation, and classroom management is akin to allowing someone who says “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on t.v.” to give you a heart transplant.

[You] cut to the jugular by proposing a 13% across-the-board budget cut from the Wisconsin University System, our cornerstone of higher education, the source of much of our skilled and educated workforce, the center for research and development for our state. Aside from clearly being anti-education, this move is clearly anti-growth.

…

Your tenure as Governor has demonstrated nothing less than a systematic attempt to dismantle public education, the cornerstone of democracy and the ladder of social mobility for any society.

How our paths have diverged from that August afternoon in 1986. True story: it was freshman orientation just outside Memorial Union. We were two of a couple thousand new Marquette University freshman wistful about what our futures held. Four years later, I graduated from Marquette and later became Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year. You never graduated, and you became the Governor of the State of Wisconsin bent on dismantling public education. Ironic, isn’t it? Situational irony at its best. I’d laugh if its ramifications weren’t so utterly destructive for the state of Wisconsin.

Sincerely,

Claudia Klein Felske

2010-2011 Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year

Marquette University Class of 1990

Once a teacher, always a teacher, and this teacher has educated all of us to the fact that Scott Walker is a liar.

Now, I know some of you might vote for the man, and that he might, well, probably not, win in 2016. But, if by some miracle he does win, and he becomes president, remember that he lied, more than once, so it must come naturally to him.

Just sayin’.

Read Claudia Klein Felske‘s full letter HERE.