Let's keep the Dem's on the run!
Click the Pic!
Posted on 10/03/2003 4:32:01 PM PDT by Pokey78
The Democratic Party may no longer be able to find a California governor mediocre enough to avoid getting recalled or a time-serving hack minimally competent enough to replace him, but by golly it still knows how to spring the ol' weekend-before-polling-day surprise.
At the same point in the 2000 presidential election, a story about an ancient drunk-driving conviction by George W. Bush hit the headlines and drove just enough still undecided voters into the Gore camp to make it a cliffhanger election.
This time round, instead of DWI (Driving While Intoxicated), it was GWF (Groping While Famous). On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times ran an exhaustive account of Arnold Schwarzenegger's wandering hands over the past 30 years, as told by six women, four of whom preferred to remain anonymous. One of the remaining two is a British television "personality". That leaves precisely one named US citizen, who claims Arnold touched her left breast. In 1975. Not a lot to show for months of opposition research.
In early August, on the weekend Arnold entered the race, I wrote in The Telegraph that whatever they had on him had better be good: "Womanising' won't cut it, not for a movie star. If it's oral sex with a starlet in his trailer, the public will shrug. If it's beating up a pre-op transsexual hooker, you're in business." In the end, they turned up some off-the-record twice-per-decade accounts of boorish grabbing.
And Arnold, in contrast to recent noted political gropers, didn't send his aides out to trash the women involved, but instead gave a generous if generalised apology. The net result? No change. On Tuesday, Gray Davis will be recalled and Schwarzenegger will be elected governor. As predicted by yours truly two months ago: "Hasta la vista, Grayby!"
Indeed, the story's chiefly of note as a belated sign of life at the LA Times. If you've never read the paper, let me say that, if there's a major world-class city anywhere on the planet with a duller choice of reading material over the breakfast table, I've yet to find it. Handed an unprecedented local story, the Times has spent the entire election campaign oscillating between weary patrician disdain at the vulgarity of it all and laughable boosterism for the beleaguered Governor.
So things must be pretty desperate if the Times has been driven to "go negative" - or, more to the point, to "go readable". I never thought, for example, I'd see this line in the LA Times: "Have you ever had a man slide his tongue in your [anus]?" Arnie, supposedly, to a crew member on Terminator 2. Well, after a zillion retakes of "I'll be back!", you can't blame a guy for varying it to "I'll be down your back".
But those brackets are an ingenious bit of editing. In replacing the offensive colloquialism and substituting the precise anatomical term, the Times has managed to make the image far more graphic. I couldn't have been more surprised if the editor had personally whispered in my ear, "Have you ever had a man slide his tongue in your brackets?" After all, this is a paper that has never lowered itself to print many of the credibly sourced remarks attributed to Clinton by those on the receiving end of his attentions ("You might want to put some ice on that").
But the lofty ethics bores of American journalism apparently have no problem with opening up their front page for anonymous one-sided accusations of ancient improper advances. In that case, did I mention the time Gray Davis grabbed me by the crotch and whispered in my ear: "Have you ever had a man tax you up the wazoo?" Or, if the issue is the violent grabbing of anonymous women, how about this? "He just went into one of his rants of, `F--- the f---ing f---, f---, f---!' He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, `Good God, Gray! Think what you are doing to me!' And he just could not stop." That's a former staffer of Davis, as reported by Jill Stewart in New Times LA in 1997.
But I wouldn't put that on the front page, either. The story here is that California is in crisis. The electorate understands that; its media don't. It's CNN that, while sniffing that this election is a "circus", runs tedious featurettes on the pornographers, sitcom actors and other fringe candidates. Meanwhile, the public winnowed the 130 runners down to a quartet almost immediately.
Indeed, the only folks obsessed with joke candidates were the media professionals who took ex-London socialite Arianna Huffington's campaign seriously. In last week's debate, Arianna and Arnold bickered constantly. The pundits assured us Arianna had come out on top. The next poll showed her with 0.4 per cent and she withdrew from the race shortly thereafter. So much for media savvy. The only bottom that's an issue in this election is Gray Davis's, and on Tuesday all it will be feeling is the electorate's boot.
Let's keep the Dem's on the run!
Click the Pic!
Time for those who have been doing their best to get cruz elected to start crying in their beer.
He'll be inviting Steyn over to "do lunch"!
"Vote for me if you vant to live." bump.
It must be a part of the pundit game that he likes a lot, because it's a constant theme. Apparently Steyn likes to test his mental powers by making many predictions and then keeping score on their accuracy.
ROFL ;^D
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