The Arnold Schwarzenegger heady Terminator as state reformer-rescuer was a classic case of "California dreamin'" trumping reality.

Shortly after Schwarzenegger announced as the candidate for change, following the myth pattern of Ronald Reagan as citizen politician, the Los Angeles Times referred to a discussion at a California Department of Employment office in Indio, a Southern California dessert town just east of Palm Springs.

A discussion had developed in a line concerning the upcoming recall election involving Governor Gray Davis.  A truck driver chortled that he could hardly wait to see the Terminator as governor "kick ass" the first time the California Legislature gave him trouble.

The subject of great concern at the time to so many citizens, and what drove such high octane rage against Governor Davis, was a car tax for which he was being blamed.  In reality, Davis had not been responsible for the car tax legislation's passage.  

Taxpayers are being forced to fund luxury vacations at luxurious resorts because of the betrayal by Congress.

How did this happen?  When Bush and the Republican congressional majority rushed through the $700 billion plus bank bailout it failed to apply caps on bankers, business bonuses, and other restrictions.

The same neglect of placing restrictions on bonuses and luxury vacation travel happened when Obama and the Democratic majority rushed through at lightning speed the second $700 billion plus bailout package.

These failed bankers and business executives who had brought about the economic collapse failed to recognize only corporate welfare at taxpayer expense was making it possible for them to have any job at all.

The New York Times on March 26 carried this headlined article:  RESIDENTS OF SACRAMENTO'S TENT CITY MOVE TO FAIRGROUND by Jesse McKinley:

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Kevin Johnson (of Sacramento) said Wednesday that they would move the Riverside encampment's 125 residents -- down from a peak of 200 -- to the state's fairgrounds until at least July.  The move, according to the governor, will give the homeless a 'dry shelter,' reliable healthcare and warm meals.

"'We're a circus for sightseers,' said Mr. Borchardt, 29, who added a few unprintable adjectives to his comments.  'People are coming here with cameras and then just walking away.  We never had sightseers before.'

"Mr. Johnson, a former NBA basketball player elected to office last year, had taken to giving tours of the camp, which sits on a rugged chunk of land beneath a crisscross of electric wires.  On one recent walkthrough he said a smaller version of tent city had been 'swept under the rug' for years, but had grown in recent months as a building bust pushed normally blue collar people to the brink."

July 6, 2007

Each year, it seems, the Grand American Puppet Show is getting longer, and the assortment of characters more diverse and talented. This time the curtain was lifted in the middle of 2006, more than two years before the Grand American Puppet Choice Day--er, excuse me, Election Day. The first two characters to appear on stage were New York Senator Hillary Clinton, representing the Democratic Party, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, representing the Republican Party.  

Did I get my Andy Warhol-allotted 15 minutes of fame when I was singled out by a veteran Los Angeles Times political reporter?

It was a dubious mention and one that we will see was delivered by someone who might well take offense to the article I wrote that resulted in my brief moment in the big time of political journalism by being singled out by Robert Salladay, then Sacramento Capitol reporter who covered Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger along with other assignments, including the 2000 presidential recount and the 2003 California recount that brought Schwarzenegger to power.

I happened to stumble on Salladay's mention of me as well as a particular column I wrote for the Political Cortex site during a routine Google search.  The mention and reference to my column appeared in the October 11, 2006 edition of Salladay's Internet column Political Muscle.

Salladay was presumably miffed by my October 6 column 5 days earlier, referring to it as "screed" or shorthand relating to a long rant or diatribe.  The only paragraph Salladay quoted related to Karl Rove's alleged involvement in the 2003 recall of California's Governor Gray Davis and the installation of Schwarzenegger.

Tonight, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed AB 43, the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act.

A recent column suggesting that the neocon image machine was busy grooming former Tennessee U.S. Senator Fred Thompson as a citizen politician, who stands above the battle, reminiscent of Ronald Reagan, is moving forward briskly.

Despite all the huffing and puffing by Republican right propagandists about Hollywood and its left wing domination, neocons of the Karl Rove stripe have an affection for actors since it is easy to blur reality with image since imagery is so strongly defined within the acting profession while images that were displayed on movie and television screens can be more easily inculcated into the public mind.  

This is particularly true in the image driven fantasy world of Fox News, Clear Channel and a society of submissive Fox zombies and Rush Limbaugh dittoheads.  

Reagan was a cowboy television narrator on "Death Valley Days" and later the GOP image machine worked overtime to depict him as just the man to topple the Soviet Union and battle terrorists all over the globe.  While the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed, historical analysis has determined with each year of analysis that this demise was ultimately destined to occur.  

If you ever needed a classic illustration of how an opportunistic candidate for public office avoided scrutiny and received a mainstream media free pass then fasten your attention on California and the classic case of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Last Saturday night NBC's Dateline resumed its series on sexual predators, targeting adult males who engaged in chat room conversations and made appointments to meet females under the age of legal consent.  

When they showed up for the anticipated assignations the men were greeted instead by Dateline commentator Chris Hansen and a battery of NBC cameras.  After talking to Hansen with great embarrassment they stepped outside, to be greeted by the local police.  With guns raised the officers commanded them to lie down on the ground, whereupon they were handcuffed.

There is one story, however, that the moral guardians of NBC Television will not handle about the predatory past of a famous individual who, unlike the truly confused and pathetic types revealed in the Dateline sting, had numerous advantages and has converted them to the position of untouchable.

One of the most conspicuous recent examples of big time mainstream media coddling with a super rich infusion of double standard hypocrisy involves Arnold Schwarzenegger.  A steroid-pumped man-child with a preoccupation with ceremony and himself was plucked from the ranks of movie action heroes to reign as California's governor.  

If California were a nation rather than America's most populous state it would be the world's sixth largest.  When opportunity came Arnold's way, after he thrilled to the election of independent Jesse Ventura, a fellow bodybuilder and former football player, as Minnesota's chief executive the former Mister Olympia hoped that one day a comparable destiny awaited him.

After Gray Davis was reelected as California's governor in 2002 Republican strategy guru Karl Rove saw vulnerability.  Corporate predator Enron applied the squeeze to the state's economy, which it ripped off with gluttonous results, generating staggering utility rises.  Rove saw a way to capitalize on the surging unpopularity of Davis, who was compelled to deal with the situation.

While Dick Cheney ignored Enron's cutthroat tactics and proclaimed that the tragedy demonstrated the necessity for more offshore drilling to increase America's energy supply, Davis was the unlucky figure to be standing in the wake of a falling giant oak.  

The Gropenator is quite desperately trying to keep Miserable Failure's enormous unpopularity here in California from bringing down his own rather bleak poll numbers.  (Bush is at a pathetic 32% here in Cali, while Arnie's numbers are not much better at 36%.)

In addition to his criticism of the Bush administration for refusing to declare a preventitive state of emergency on California's fragile levee system, Arnold allowed himself a few more words of dissent from the Party Line on This Week with George Stephanopoulos this morning.

These, unsurprisingly, involved the issues where solidly Blue State California differs dramatically from President Fredo such as the environment and immigration.  Arnie allowed himself (gasp) to make the startlingly Reality-Based remark that it may just be hard to deny global warming much longer, and, perhaps, that building a wall along the Mexican border is a bit of a simplistic solution to illegal immigration (you think?).

Hopefully more than a few Americans were paying attention when the nation's mayors coalesced in February 2005, as the Kyoto Protocol took effect in 141 countries but not the United States.  Under the leadership of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement was implemented.  

The April 3, 2006 edition of Time traces the upshot of this ambitious and ecologically essential undertaking.  Thus far 218 mayors from 39 states representing 44 million Americans have signed on to the Agreement's 12-step program for their own cities to "meet or beat" Kyoto's original target for the U.S.  

This objective involves cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels over the next six years.

Portland, Seattle's neighbor to the south along Interstate 5, assuredly captured Nickels's attention with the head start it achieved in tackling global warming and its effects beginning in 1993.  Emissions had been slashed by 13 percent per capita, partly by building light rail and 730 miles of regional bikeways.

Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters is writing an interesting ten part series on how Governor Schwarzenegger managed to fall from being the conquering action hero of the recall election in 2003 to the goat of his own special election in 2005. The whole series is current available through this link.

Today's installment was called "Schwarzenegger's clashes with women haunted his ballot drive." According to Walters,

Arnold Schwarzenegger has a problem with women, and it has been a major factor in derailing his governorship.

No doubt about it; the Governor holds women in contempt and we sense it.

The devastating defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered in California in an expensive $50 million dollar special election he put before the voters to seize control of the fractious Golden State political agenda resulted in the destruction of a myth created with the assistance of an all too compliant mainstream media.  

Rewind and run the clock back to the period when Schwarzenegger had announced himself as a candidate in the effort to recall Gray Davis less than a year after the then governor had been reelected by a margin the same size as that of Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1970.  A Los Angeles Times article pinpointed the mythical element at work in the Schwarzenegger candidacy   The revealing Times piece focused on the scene at a Department of Motor Vehicles office in the desert town of Indio and revealed the thoughts of a truck driver standing in line and passing time discussing politics.

There are situations where almost no spin is necessary, and no counterspin is possible.  (Well, okay, in politics there will always be counterspin, but sometimes it really is spitting in the wind.)

As the San Francisco Chronicle notes:

But even the ever-optimistic Schwarzenegger will be unable to sugarcoat the disappointing election results, which show he had lost the overwhelming voter support he had just last year.

"This must be the worst defeat the governor has ever had,'' said Kevin Spillane, a GOP consultant. "It's not like having a movie that underperforms. This is going to be page one in every paper in California.

"Now, we have to see how he deals with defeat.''

Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California as a gimmick, to replace an uncharismatic, uncommunicative centrist Democratic governor who had been unable to deflect the blame for a myriad of state problems.  The recall campaign provided an opportunity for a grinning faux populist like Arnold to bamboozle enough Democratic voters in the context of an extremely condensed, extremely high profile campaign.

But now the good voters of California have awakened from their night out, and they have seen just who they decided to bring home.  And they want out.