Dave Zweifel is a living fossil of Madison’s Cap Times, the guy who has spent decades treating every Republican as a moral defect and every Democrat as a heroic public servant. This week he looked at Tom Tiffany swimming out of a sinking Beechcraft in Lake Wausau, stitches over the eye, thanking God and the fire department, and decided the real story was that a plane crash does not make Tiffany “a better candidate.” Nobody serious said it did. Zweifel needed a hook to unload the same tired, overused list he has been typing since Tommy Thompson was in office. So he despicably chose the plane crash as his opening to roll out the same tired character assassination he always levels.
On September 12, Tiffany and pilot Len Boltz lost power on final approach to Wausau in the dark. Ten seconds after “we are going down,” they hit the water. They sat on the sinking plane, called 911, swam 150 feet to a sandbar, and waited for an airboat. Tiffany took 12 stitches in the eyebrow after his head hit the dash. Boltz took four. Crowley, to his credit, said he was grateful nobody died. Mark Belling said if you can handle that, you can handle a crisis. Normal people said thank God they lived and the first responders for providing aid. Zweifel said, in effect, wipe those tears; here is why you are still a villain.
Then came the old man’s rant. Zweifel recycled every attack and the ‘orange man bad’ lines that the left has made against Republicans. Tiffany, Zweifel writes, even voted to make contraception illegal. That last one is the tell. It is the kind of line a curmudgeon writes when he has stopped caring whether it is true, and a line that editors without any integrity or intellectual honesty let slip by. Zweifel will go as far as inventing issues and only cares whether it hurts Republicans and helps the left. Zweifel needed one more smear to hang on a guy who had just swum out of a lake.
He wraps it with the cheap psychology of the Madison newsroom. Surviving a crash, he insists, tells us less about Tiffany’s character than a website that no longer advertises every vote the left hates. To Zweifel, character is measured by scorecards from Planned Parenthood and the League of Conservation Voters. Calm under an emergency water landing, gratitude to first responders, a cracked voice at a firehouse – none of that counts. To Zweifel, it’s all staged. The real Tom Tiffany is the one Dave has invented in his column inches.
The Cap Times keeps an emeritus columnist, who’s spent his lifetime hating Republicans professionally, to yell at clouds. He is the grouch at the end of State Street who hears that a GOP nominee almost died and thinks, good, now I can talk about abortion again. He even scolds “conspiracy theories” about the crash, as if he is the adult in the room, then spends the rest of the piece doing something worse: turning a mechanical failure and a 68-year-old man with stitches into a character assassination.
Families reach a point with grandpa when he refuses to give up the keys to his car. He claims he can still be independent, then he starts driving into mailboxes. And families realize they need to take the keys. The Cap Times is past that point with Zweifel. He’s doing far more harm than good. He’s an embarrassment, and the paper keeps handing him the column anyway. It’s time to take away grandpa’s keyboard.
