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A Conservative Travesty

California's recall -- a riot of millionaires masquerading as a "revolt of the people" -- began with a rich conservative Republican congressman, who could think of no other way he might become governor, financing the gathering of the necessary signatures. Now this exercise in "direct democracy" -- precisely what America's Founders devised institutions to prevent -- has ended with voters full of self-pity and indignation removing an obviously incompetent governor. They have removed him from the office to which they reelected him after he had made his incompetence obvious by making most of the decisions that brought the voters to a boil.

The odor of what some so-called conservatives were indispensable to producing will eventually arouse them from their swoons over Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then they can inventory the damage they have done by seizing an office that just 11 months ago they proved incapable of winning in a proper election under ideal conditions.

These Schwarzenegger conservatives -- now, there is an oxymoron for these times -- have embraced a man who is, politically, Hollywood's culture leavened by a few paragraphs of Milton Friedman. They have given spurious plausibility to a meretricious accusation that Democrats are using to poison American politics, the charge that Florida 2000 was part of a pattern of Republican power grabs outside the regular election process.


George F. Will, The Washington Post

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Bill, Arnold and double standards

The California recall campaign was a noisy, raucous and often vitriolic affair. But the most striking feature of the final days was the silence. That was what you heard from conservatives on the subject of Arnold Schwarzenegger's sexual escapades.

Here was a guy who, voters learned, told a skin magazine in 1977 that he had a stripper girlfriend, hung out with prostitutes and engaged in group sex. Then last week, The Los Angeles Times reported that six women said he had forced himself on them, grabbing breasts and bottoms and trying to pull off clothing.

The charges clearly had at least some truth. Schwarzenegger didn't admit anything specific, but he didn't exactly proclaim his innocence, either. "Wherever there is smoke, there is fire," he said. "I have behaved badly sometimes." Other women came forward with similar accounts.

When Schwarzenegger insisted that "a lot of these are made-up stories," NBC anchor Tom Brokaw asked him, "So you deny all these stories about grabbing?" Replied Arnold: "No, not all." But he declined to tell which ones were true. Asked by Brokaw to be more specific about his actions, he replied, "As soon as the campaign is over, I will." What's your hurry, Tom?

At best, the evidence indicates that Schwarzenegger has a habit of sexual battery--defined in the California Penal Code as touching "an intimate part of another person, if the touching is against the will of the person touched, and is for the specific purpose of sexual arousal, sexual gratification, or sexual abuse."

This goes beyond the behavior that unleashed a scandal on Bill Clinton. His encounter with Monica Lewinsky was consensual, and his crude alleged proposition to Paula Jones stopped short of using force. Kathleen Willey said Clinton forcibly kissed and fondled her, though he relented when she rebuffed him. (It was not until after he was acquitted in his impeachment trial that another woman went public claiming he had raped her, and that was never proven.)

Clinton's adulterous conduct was enough to outrage conservative moralists. Columnist and former Reagan administration official Linda Chavez said that the actions described by Paula Jones didn't amount to sexual harassment but were "gross and disgusting, and, I think, make Clinton unfit to be president." The Wall Street Journal's shocked editorial writers asked, "What manner of man is it who takes sexual advantage of 21-year-old interns?"

David Frum, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, asserted that "what's at stake in the Lewinsky scandal" is "the central dogma of the Baby Boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it's consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all." William Bennett, author of several books celebrating old-fashioned values, said Clinton "acted sexually more like an alley cat than an adult."

Maybe the defenders of virtue exhausted themselves so thoroughly attacking Clinton that they have no energy left to find fault with Schwarzenegger. In any event, I have yet to hear a peep of disgust from the major moralists of the right.

The Wall Street Journal admitted in passing that Schwarzenegger's alleged behavior was "crude and insulting"-- which sounds like a great understatement--while crowing that "his candor will strike voters as a welcome contrast to the usual political stonewalling or denials." But his "candor" was of the sort that is now universally known by the term "Clintonesque"--making a vague admission to defuse the issue while denying anything truly incriminating.

David Frum, in his regular column for National Review Online, didn't denounce Baby Boomer morality, but simply ignored the whole unpleasant business. Bill Bennett, the go-to guy on matters of morality, was missing in action. The cat got Linda Chavez's tongue.

So consider their double standard. When Clinton submitted to oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, conservatives thought it was morally repugnant. They also thought it disqualified him from remaining in office. As a Wall Street Journal editorial declared, "A business executive or college president caught having sex with an intern less than half his age would today be quickly dismissed."

Yet they're happy to have as governor of California someone who, by his own admission, has forced himself on unwilling women. Their new darling is a more aggressive sexual predator than the president they tried to remove from office. Morality? Law? They'll leave it to liberals to fret about such irrelevancies.

But if the charges persist and multiply, I predict conservatives will find a way to address Arnold's behavior: They'll blame it on Clinton.

Steve Chapman

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I'd include "fucking Marlyn Monroe" but who can blame a guy for that?

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Now the Dems, if they push it, become hypocrites

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In the California recall, the right wing's moralistic masters of attack choked on their own partisanship. These are the people who praised the "courage" of anyone who reported anything embarrassing about the sex life of a certain former president. Then they painted all who did not respond with indignation as "apologists" complicit in America's moral decline and the "death of outrage."

Guess who the apologists were this time? All of a sudden it was Arnold Schwarzenegger being accused of groping, fondling and humiliating women. Oh, yes, there was outrage on the right. But it was directed at the Los Angeles Times for investigating and reporting on the charges. The same folks who had insisted that our leaders should be moral exemplars were suddenly aghast when a news organization explored the "character" of, well, er, a Republican. Fox's Bill O'Reilly on Schwarzenegger: "The Los Angeles Times is out to get him, to destroy him. . . . Most guys have done dopey things with women." Bill O'Reilly on Clinton during impeachment: "The American people have a right to know everything there is to know about President Clinton's behavior."

Schwarzenegger was very shrewd about the whole business. Unlike Bill Clinton -- whose impeachment, by the way, he had criticized -- Schwarzenegger did not deny the undeniable. But he picked up tricks from the master, going after the whole left-wing conspiracy. And he used the moralists' weapon of choice, talk radio, to drive his attacks home. His opponents were "throwing everything at me plus the kitchen sink," Schwarzenegger told talk host Sean Hannity. He accused Davis of sending out "surrogate women" to come up with new accusers.

Shouldn't this election have been an easy call for the moralists? Here you had dull, stolid, old-values Gray Davis, who even went to Mass on Election Day. He was opposed by one of those permissive Hollywood stars against whom the right wing fulminates for daring to express political opinions. But, hey, Arnold is no Susan Sarandon. His views -- on taxes, big government and business regulation, if not on abortion and gay rights -- were good enough for the purposes of this recall. Who cares about a little hanky-panky when a Democratic governor can be thrown out of office?

You get the sneaking feeling that the right may come to regret this deal with The Terminator. Yes, his victory was a triumph over incompetent Democrats who should never have allowed things to come to this. The World Series of Recrimination is a coming Democratic attraction. But Schwarzenegger's campaign was a rebuke to partisans of the Republican right, and not only because they had to eat tens of thousands of their own words about sex and morality. They were also forced to buy into a political strategy they had rejected in the past.

A few months after Gray Davis won his first election as governor in 1998, a group of political strategists gathered at the University of California's Institute for Governmental Studies to dissect the campaign. Davis, remember, won in a year when Republicans made attacking Clinton one of their national themes. Leslie Goodman, one of the GOP's shrewdest California strategists, said her party had "created the sense that the Republican Party was the judgmental party or the judging party, and the Democrats were the helping party." She went on: "The era of preacher politics is over. People don't want ideologues wagging fingers in their faces."

Say what you will about Arnold: He's not judgmental. He wagged fingers only at Gray Davis and the L.A. Times. And as Goodman would have predicted, he held on to conservatives while making deep inroads into the old Democratic coalition. Exit polling showed that Schwarzenegger won 41 percent of the vote from those who favor legal abortion, 37 percent from union members, 31 percent from Hispanics, 20 percent from self-described liberals and 18 percent from Democrats.

As for the Times, it was correct to run its groping story before the election, but far better had it been published a week or two earlier. Voters have made clear their sensible preference that the sex lives of politicians be treated as private matters unless an overwhelming case is made for going public. In this case, Californians were not given time to decide whether this report was more about sex or more about something closer to battery. Even with additional time, an electorate desperate for change might still have made the same choice it did on Tuesday. But by being able to dismiss the charges as a last-minute hit, Schwarzenegger evaded their public implications.

Conservatives might reasonably argue that Clinton's success in beating impeachment and Arnold's election both represent the triumph of the Permissive Society. But this week, conservatives themselves were complicit in its victory. Mark Oct. 7, 2003, as the day conservatives' moral outrage died.

E. J. Dionne, The Washington Post

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Originally posted by Ritten:
Till they make him the fucking President.... Bet Florida plays a key role there too....

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JesusMaryMotherOfFUckingChrist I HOPE NOT!

I Live in Fort lauderdale and I'm sick to death of every fucking crazy thing originating in my state.
Fuck, I even had three 9/11 hijackers in my work using the internet a month or so before the attack!
I probably walkeed right past them while leaving for the day.
There's a local Rallian chapter.
Every kind of "pride parage" you can imagine every weekend (sometoimes clashing with each other)
...and dont even get me started on our election processes or city corruption!

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Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.
-Aeschylus, Agamemnon