Unbelievable.

In a recent WisOpinion editorial, Sheriff David Clarke blamed the Democrats for his alliegance to the GOP.

Milwaukee area Democrats are steamed that Clarke continues to run as a Democrat in the heavily democratic Milwaukee County because Clarke clearly doesn’t share their values — not the least among them being the support of other democrats.

Clarke has been a booster of any GOP member who had a chance to take out a dem. Most recently his support of Tim Michaels, the ne0-conservative candidate for Senate who got handily beaten by Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. Clarke was grinning on stage upon every opportunity to ally himself with Michaels.

In Clarke’s column, How one becomes a Republican, he cites Ronald Reagan who “journeyed from the left side of the political spectrum to the right by simply thinking for himself”. But if Clarke was truly motivated by honesty and some sort of intellectual rebirth, then why did he ever run as a democrat?

The fact is that Clarke is a political opportunist and a liar.

He was a lousy cop and he’s a lousy Sheriff. When he worked for the Milwaukee Police Department his attitude landed him in an undesireable assignment as a foot patrol in the old Northridge. To protest, Clarke shaved the sides of hs head and sported a mohawk. Yes, Mr. Maturity himself who always blames others for mistakes in the Sheriff’s department decided to show his bosses that if they wanted to give him that assignment, he would give the face of the MPD the same image as punk rockers. Gee, that was real mature.

Clarke couldn’t have hoped for better when then Republican Governor Scott McCallum appointed him as the Sheriff of Milwaukee County. After all, how would a punk cop ever get the job otherwise? One of the other candidates, Peter Misko, had actually been a Deputy Sheriff but got passed over by McCallum because he was a Democrat. Luck was clearly in the cards though for Clarke when Misko and former Cudahy (or was it South Milwaukee?) Police Chief Ron Hayes jumped in the race. That meant that Clarke would have the chance to win the primary with less than half of the vote and who ever won the Democratic primary was all but assured of winning in the general since Milwaukee County likes to elect Democrats for all its higher offices.

So Clarke’s reasons for saying he is a democrat are purely political. He has been asked by Milwaukee Democrats to join the party and he refuses.

It never ceases to amaze me when the Republican party says they’re the party of Lincoln and tries to feign caring for racial minorities. In Clarke’s article he talks about how Democrats in the Jim Crow south tried to prohibit minorities from voting. It is this rationale that Clarke uses to explain how he is making his conversion to being a Republican.

But is Clarke so naive that he doesn’t understand how there was a complete and total flip-flop in party ideologies which culminated with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act? All of the old southern segregationists who were Democrats flipped and became Republicans. They used to call the south “the solid south” because it was solidly Democratic. After Johnson signed the civil rights act he was heard to say to one of his democratic cohorts, and I’m paraphrasing, “because of this, we’ve just lost the south for a generation”.

Clearly Abraham Lincoln would have been a Democrat in todays times.

As a now-seasoned pol, Clarke is good at patting himself on the back. He credits his parents for instilling in him “virtues like character, integrity, loyalty, faith, courage, patriotism, responsibility and commitment”. It’s too bad that honesty wasn’t one of the virtues they taught him.
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For some other insight on Clarke’s 13,000 screw ups, check out Gretchen Schuldt’s story Where’s Clarke’s Personal Responsibility When it Comes to Jail Mess?