g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Monday, July 19, 2004
20:00 - Life imitates art
http://instapundit.com/archives/016630.php

(top) link
So we've got Arnie quite literally kicking all kinds of ass all around the State; he's got 70% of California cozying up to him just to bask in his glow (as opposed to the reported 30% approval rating for the State Assembly), he's restored California's credit rating and got the Davis budget under control, he's declared war on bloodsucking trial lawyers and frivolous lawsuits by proposing gigantic taxes on punitive damages, and he's done it all with a slickness even Clinton could never match. And now, as he starts to unveil his grand master plan for a complete political overhaul of the State's intractably byzantine legislative system, he slips into character to deliver the coup de grace:

But the governor was engaged in a lot more than just sound-bite politics. His spokesman indicated he was seriously considering sponsoring initiatives to both change the entrenched legislature to part-time status and to redraw California’s gerrymandered political districts. “This weekend, the budget fight stopped being about local government and started being about major political reform,” said Dan Schnur, a GOP political consultant.

The California electorate is hungry for such change, and the governor had large crowds in three cities eating out of his hand. “I want you to go out there and go after those Democratic legislators. Vote them out of office, and we will put new faces in there,” he said in Stockton. The audience in Ontario went wild when he launched into a description of how legislators catered to special interests: “If they don’t have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, ‘I don’t want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers, and I want them to make the millions of dollars—if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men.”

Needless to say, the crowd loved it. And what lesson do we take from this? Not that Arnie is a great politician, though he may well be; but that after all the smoke has settled, it appears that this dirty little secret may be showing its face after all: we Californians actually did vote for a character, not a politician. Or at least in part. We might as well face it: we didn't hire him to be just another vague, harmless, compromising diplodoormat with a set of mild moderate views and a charcoal-gray suit; we hired him to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. We were fed up with Gray Davis and bureaucracy-as-usual, and wanted someone to come bursting in, guns blazing, and take out the trash. No more PC bullshit, we said; just get in here and kick some ass. We might have convinced ourselves that we were punching the ballot for "Mr. Schwarzenegger", but the image in our minds was the T-100.

But is this such a bad thing? When we vote for a politician who's already typecast a certain way, as an action hero or a football player or a cowboy, we do it with a certain gut feeling that the person will execute the office in a way that's informed by the role in which we picture him. We've done it before. And it doesn't seem to be beyond the realm of possibility that the politician in question actually will decide, as Arnie seems to have done here, to play the role to the hilt. If the public wants the Terminator, he thinks, or the musclebound caricature of him from SNL—well then, that's what he'll be.

Damn if it isn't working.

But this is the best bit, straight from the self-parodying, "can dish it out but can't take it" files:

Democrats responded that the remark was sexist, anti-gay and bullying...

Ha! HAAAH! HAAA HA HA HA HA HA ha ha ha HAAAAAAAA! <snerk> HEEEE hee hee hee heeheeheeheeheeee heh heh heh. <snort> Pbbbbbtttttt. Ha ha ha HAAAAAAAA HAW HAW HAW Hhhheeheeheeeeee. <wiping tears> Hee hee hee hee HAAA HA HA HAAAAAH!

Oh, Lord have mercy, that's just beautiful.


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