Governor Potty Mouth

Katy Grimes:  After calling Meg Whitman a “Nazi” last summer, Gubernatorial candidate and former California Governor Jerry Brown, stooped to an all-time low using the word “whore,” to describe his opponent after she landed the endorsement from the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

In an audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Brown can be heard leaving a voice message for Scott Rate, a union official for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, asking Rate for the league’s endorsement. Brown thinks he ended the call, but apparently the call doesn’t end, and the office conversation is captured.

Perhaps even as egregious as the vulgar comment, is the complicit media which tried to sell the incident as being done by a “Brown staffer.” And, while Brown clearly tried to throw a staffer under the bus, his campaign claimed it was just “salty language.”

 All over the state, media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and Sacramento television news station KOVR Channel 13, reported, “Brown Aide Overheard Calling Whitman ‘A Whore’.”

And not one of those media outlets said that Brown also called Whitman a “whore.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote in a story titled, An associate of Jerry Brown calls Meg Whitman a whore…,  “In a private conversation that was inadvertently taped by a voicemail machine (audio here), an associate of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown can be heard referring to his Republican opponent Meg Whitman as a “whore” for cutting a deal protecting law enforcement pensions as the two candidates competed for police endorsements.”

But as I listened to the audio, as plenty of others have now, it is clear that it wasn’t just the staffer who calls Whitman a “whore” – Brown also uses the word. Brown even says it a second time, and adds, “I’m going to use that.”

This is the guy who wants to be governor – again. What a class act.

And while Brown has never been known for his je ne sais quoi or savoir faire, one would assume that at age 72, after holding numerous elected offices in the state, he might have learned to show a little more self-control when referring to the opposite sex in vulgar, derogatory terms.

After all, Brown’s campaign is running on “experience.” What kind of “experience” will the state be getting if  Brown is reelected?

It was only last June, when the LA Times reported, “Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown doesn’t deny that he recently compared his Republican rival Meg Whitman’s approach to political advertising to that of the fanatical Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.”

As the audio nears the end, Brown excitedly insists to his staff they they call the union head back. But one staffer tells Brown “Let’s not sound desperate. Move on.”

If this is California Dreaming, we’re doomed.

“Salty language,” my ass!

 The audio is located within the story courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.

OCT. 8, 2010