SHUT UP, HE EXPLAINED (CONT’D): Wisconsin Democratic Party flak threatens to sic union bullies on independent news group.

Zeilinski’s email could easily be read as a threat to organize union demonstrators against Wisconsin newspapers that publish reporting provided to them by WisconsinReporter.com’s staff. And his vow to go after WisconsinReporter.com’s capitol media credentials is an obvious effort to silence a news organization with which he disagrees.

When WisconsinReporter.com asked Beth Bennett, executive director of the Wisconsin Newspapers Association, for comment on Zeilinski’s threats, she characterized them as “out there” and unlike anything she’s seen previously during her career in Wisconsin government and media.

With their power-base threatened, Wisconsin’s political establishment is cracking up. Expect to see the same sort of thing on the national level, as matters progress.

UPDATE: Moe Lane mocks: “Zielinski went, to be charitable about it, a little crazy at this point. After castigating the author of the piece and complaining that the original article made him and his party ‘look even smaller’ in the process, Graeme Zielinski went on to demonstrate that he was capable of making him and his party look smaller all on his own, via a direct threat. . . . Good job getting this story out into wider circulation, Zielinski. Particularly since people outside of Republican circles are lining up to politely ask you what the heck your party thought that it was trying to accomplish, here.”

It’s hard to get good goons nowadays.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clarice Feldman on the crackup. “I have come to believe that the reactions I received represented a rage at the dying of all that which these men had embraced in the absolute certainty of the righteousness and soundness of their views, and their right to have them automatically accepted as the approved model for all right thinking people. . . . the elite liberal of a certain age is experiencing a major life crisis as the march of history leaves them as but rather laughable footnotes — believers hanging on to 20th century versions of phlogiston and spontaneous generation.”