Shepard Smith, the Fox News renegade, may have mistakenly thought on Wednesday that he has a new job at rival network MSNBC.
On Wednesday’s “Studio B,” Shepard Smith said the battle over union rights in Wisconsin was all about busting unions and securing Republican political power, not about the state’s budget deficit.
As the Huffington Post pointed out, it was a point of view that placed Smith squarely in agreement with people such as Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz, who have repeatedly argued essentially the same thing on their MSNBC shows.
Speaking to a mostly-in-agreement Juan Williams, Smith said the fight was “100 percent politics.”
“There is no budget crisis in Wisconsin,” he said, adding that the unions “[have] given concessions.”
The real point of the fight, Smith said, could be found in the list of the nation’s top ten donors to political campaigns. Seven of the ten are corporate donors to Republicans. The other three are unions donating to Democrats.
“Bust the unions, and it’s over,” Smith said. He then brought up the Koch brothers, the billionaires who have bankrolled much of the anti-union pushback in Wisconsi, according to HuffPo. The fight, Smith said, “started” with the Kochs, who he said were trying to get a return on the money they donated to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign.
“I’m not taking a side on this, I’m just telling you what’s going on…to pretend this is about a fiscal crisis in the state of Wisconsin is malarkey,” Smith said.