Arnold's Back — Crass as Ever

APRIL 19, 2011

By JOHN SEILER

Since he left office in disgrace on January 3, we haven’t heard much from ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger-Kennedy Shriver. After spending seven years in office wrecking the state, he’s mostly kept to himself. Despite his avowed environmental mania, he’s been burning massive amounts of fossil fuels tooling around in his Mercedes panzer.

Well, now he’s back. Crass as ever. Solely focused on his “Numero Uno” ego. He’s even defending his commutation of the sentence of Esteban Nunez, the son of ex-Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, an accomplice to murder. Arnold said:

I understand people’s disappointments. I understand the parents’ [of the murder victim] anger. I would probably feel the same way. My office definitely made a mistake in not notifying the parents beforehand … and I’m ultimately responsible.

Get that? His office made a mistake. Not him. He continued:

I feel good about the decision …. I happen to know the kid really well. I don’t apologize about it. There’s criticism out there. I think it’s just because of our working relationship and all that. It maybe was kind of saying, ‘That’s why he did it.’ Well, hello! I mean, of course you help a friend.

Not by abusing your office, you don’t! Excuse me for saying this, but Arnold is … never mind.

Yes, you help your friend by, say, recommending a good lawyer for the murderer, or maybe loaning your friend some money to pay for the lawyer. But a public office is a public trust. If you can’t conduct that office responsibly, then you shouldn’t run for it.

Arnold, as he did in his previous careers in bodybuilding and Hollywood, just didn’t care about the reaction of others. It’s all about him, his friends and nobody else.

He didn’t put himself in the place of the families of the dead victim of Estaban Nunez’s crime.

Dissing Meg

After revealing himself to be an amoral fraud, Arnold continued by dissing Meg Whitman:

She kind of took herself out of the game. What she did was play to the right, and she couldn’t come back for the general election to grab the center …. Brown was very smart to do exactly the opposite of what she did — which was to say, ‘I’m not a rich guy, all I have is my knowledge and experience, and I don’t need to cater to anyone, I will do what is right for California.’ She was not as effective as a communicator, and her ideas were too extreme.

Is he kidding? She spent her whole campaign being obsessed with moderation — so much so that nobody could figure out what she stood for. For example, she bowed before the altar of Arnold’s strange god, AB 32. But she also said she would suspend it for a year.

I didn’t support Meg and thought she ran the worst campaign I’ve ever seen, as I wrote often here on this site. But Arnold ignored the main reason Meg never had a chance: Arnold’s seven years of destroying California.

Voters thought: “Arnold spent seven years wrecking California. What party is he in? Republican? Never vote for one of them again.”

About the only thing Arnold did to help Whitman, putatively his “fellow” Republican, was to not campaign for her. If he actually had campaigned for her, she would have received 21 percent instead of 41 percent.

Immoderately Moderate

His moderate schtick also is tiresome. He won in 2003 by appearing to be a radical reformer. He promised to “cut up the credit cards” of state debt, “terminate” the state’s perennial state budget problems and conduct “action! action! action!”

Instead, we got “moderation” — a record $13 billion tax increase in 2009, which didn’t solve a budget deficit that now is $26 billion. His “moderate” polices destroyed jobs, bringing unemployment of 12.4 percent last year, his last in office, the second worst  rate in the nation behind Nevada’s.

I can’t think of a politician who ever won when the incumbent from the same party left behind 12.4 percent unemployment. It’s hard to find sympathy for Meg, who can cry in a soup dish filled with a fortune of more than $1.4 billion, but Arnold left her only disaster to work with.

Here’s a YouTube of the final scene from “Commando.” After Arnold has killed everyone, by himself, a general choppers in and asks: “Leave anything for us?”

Arnold quips: “Juszt bodiez.”

That’s how he left us: we’re all just bodies rotting in the California sun.

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