Years ago, the great leftist New York journalist Nat Hentoff told me that I should start paying attention to Shep Smith on FOX. I never really took him up on it. Perhaps I should.

Smith, while declaring that he is not taking sides, dismisses in the video clip below Republicans’ position that Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to banish collective bargaining from the public sector is about balancing the state’s budget. It’s all about union-busting, he says. “To pretend that this is about a fiscal crisis in the state of Wisconsin is malarkey,” he tells analyst Juan Williams.

He even adopts a Rachel Maddow-esque line by going farther and stating that what is really happening is a power play by Wisconsin Republicans to kill off their political rivals.

Have you looked at the list of the Top 10 donors to political campaigns in America? … Seven of those 10 donate to Republicans. The other three that remain of those top 10, they all donate to Democrats and they’re all unions. Bust the unions, it’s over. … People don’t want to hear the facts. Let [people] get angry. Facts are troublesome creatures from time to time.