Meg Whitman: Super Liberal!

Steve Poizner: Ultra Hippie!

Jerry Brown: Jerry Brown! 

OMG! The only choices for governor of California are two raging, left wing hippie commie liberals and Jerry Brown. What kind of crazy bizzarro world have I fallen into?

That’s what I was starting to think after seeing all those commercials by Meg and Steve.

One such ad begins, “How Liberal is Steve Poizner?” I thought it was going to have a punch line like, “He’s so liberal he wants to make pot smoking mandatory!” or “ He’s so liberal he’s friended Fidel Castro on Face Book.”

Disappointingly, the actual message is more akin to, “Steve Poizner is so liberal, I actually saw him make a left turn once!” (The horror!)

Then there is Meg  Whitman. “She’s so left wing she wants death panels to apply to everyone, not just old people.”  “She wants to just throw the borders open and let all the illegals come up and take your stuff.” Wow!  It’s as if Barry Goldwater came back from the grave to accuse Ronald Reagan of being a pinko.

Beckett, Pinter, or Ionesco couldn’t have written more absurdist tomes than these people have.

So I go over to Steve and Meg’s websites expecting to see some wild and crazy ideas about how to fix our currant governmental difficulties and wham there it is, the same bumper sticker sound bite slogans about cutting taxes, reducing the size of government and using the National Guard to stop illegal immigration. On both web sites are the exact same ideas, ones that are about as liberal as joining the chamber of commerce or the NRA.  It’s the perfect case of the pot calling the kettle red.

Now, just for a little more head spinning fun, I went over to check Jerry Brown’s site and sure enough, he’s Mr. Law and Order, Attorney General Bad-ass with military school tough love and putting punks in prison bla bla. What? I would’ve never guessed that this was the guy whose nickname used to be “Moonbeam.”

Of course if you spend a little time at these websites you’ll discover the truth about each candidate’s ideology, which is pretty boring. More often than not the ideology gets in the way of actual, workable, possibilities.

I’m sure that whoever wins in the “Meg & Steve Less Liberal Than Thou” sweepstakes is going to spend most of their time beating up on Jerry (and vise-a-versa) until November.

They’ll tell us how their opponent is a communist fascist McCarthyist Marxist who hates themselves and mankind. At least, based upon what I’ve seen so far, that’s what I’m expecting to hear.

Listening to candidates continuously pander to their base is not only a huge drag, it’s a big part of what’s wrong with this country’s political process. They don’t give us solutions, they just tell us what they think we want to hear.

It’s too bad, because I was hoping to hear some real practical plans about how to make California the shining, golden, near utopia it was when I moved here way back in 1981.

It was the land of opportunity, prosperity, facility, individuality, and realization.

Now let me think, who was governor then…

Gasp!  Moonbeam?

Fine Obama Whine

In 2001 I was actually kind of glad that W won the election. How’s that for a crazy opening statement? It’s true. I was so sick and tired of the previous eight years of the constant bitching and whining by the Republicans about the Clinton administration, I thought that if Gore gets elected the whining would ramp up to such a horrible pitch that my head might literally explode. What a nasty mess that would be! Plus, I thought, how bad can W be? I mean the country is in pretty good shape, there’s a budget surplus for the first time since JFK, plenty of jobs, no wars. It could work, right?

Well for the first nine months every thing was pretty much ok. W looked like he was shaping up to be a pretty mediocre president, not a whole lot for either side to go nuts about. I had read “Fortunate Son” by J Hatfield so I figured he wasn’t going to be any kind of visionary or otherwise spectacular leader (as Al Franken said, “We elected the only guy in Texas who couldn’t find oil.”).

That didn’t matter much because the important thing is that the whining had stopped. Whew! My head did not explode and there would be no horrible bloody mess for my wife to clean up. As long as he didn’t get caught getting a bj in the oval office, I figured that the opposing ideological factions that existed in this country could return to a state of civility. You know, the kind where everybody works for the greater good.

We had taken a trip to Europe in April of that year and nearly every European we talked to thought we had shot ourselves in the foot as a country. “Probably” I said, “But listen… no whining.” Towards the end of our trip, on May 8th, after a long day of driving, we were watching euro TV in our provincial motel room and the only sound was cheering. Channel after euro channel of parades and re-enactments of American-loving V-E Day celebrations. Cheering is way nicer than whining.

Then of course 9/11 happened and for about ten minutes we were a country united against a common enemy. And then W stepped up from mediocrity and invaded the wrong country, fought a half-assed war in the right country, let Bin-Laden get away, gave sweetheart no-bid contracts to big oil companies, appointed incompetent cronies, ignored a hurricane, presided over the worst recession since the depression, and the list went on and on.

But the whining noise had already begun. First it was a cry of righteous anger about how our civil rights were being dismantled, habeas corpus being thrown out, lives being sacrificed, money being wasted, our leaders being caught lying to us on a mass scale. Soon however, those cries were drowned out by even more whining.

Question the President? That’s treasonous whaaa, whaaa. I want freedom fries whaa. The French won’t help us whaa, whaa. Either you’re with us or agin’ us whaa, whaa. It’s all Clinton’s fault whaa, whaa…
The pressure in my head began to build. I began researching places to live that had no access to media, TV, Internet, or other people. A cave in the Amazon jungle was starting to look pretty attractive.

I some how managed to survive the cacophonous noise that was very much like scraping your teeth along a chalkboard while sticking your hand into an commercial blender, all the way until 2008.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a new guy sprang onto the scene! A guy who was not a W or a W clone. He was an O as in hero, as in super hero. The O man was here to save the day!
He came from on high to rescue us from the evils, the villains, the Cheneys, the seventh circle of hell, and bring us all back onto the paths of righteousness.

This guy had it all. He was smart, honest, and handsome. He could speak in whole sentences. He could use multi-syllable words. He was a constutional scholar. He was altruistic yet pragmatic. I’ve got to vote for this guy I thought, he’s like a cross between JFK, Billy DeWilliams, and Gandhi!

Sadly, it wasn’t even three months after the inauguration when the shrill cries of contempt rose up like a chainsaw symphony. Oh the horrors! No birth certificate whaa, whaa! Not really American whaa, whaa! Death panels whaa, whaa. We want our country back whaa, whaa. He reads a teleprompter. He’s a grandma- and baby-killing Nazi-communist who wants to run General Motors whaa, whaa, whaa, whaa haaaa haaaa…

And if that wasn’t enough to make my ears bleed, the whining is now starting to come in stereo. Not just satisfied to perforate my right eardrum, the noise is also assaulting my left side. O is trying to do too much too soon whaa, whaa. He got the wrong kind of dog, he swatted a fly whaa, whaa. He hasn’t done anything, he hasn’t fixed eight years of stupid overnight whaa, whaa.

He can’t walk on water, he’s just a mere mortal human whaa, whaa, whaa!!!

Since Obamaman is less than a year into his term, I’m going to give him some room to work. He may not be Gandhi/Batman incarnate, but if you look at his record and the circumstances surrounding his ascension to the throne, he’s really done quite a lot.
I also think that the big O is working his strategy at a deliberate pace designed to have long-term success, and not just a quick fix.

Whether or not his policies work, there is still the danger that the whining will reach the kind of fever pitch that will make dogs howl and heads explode.

So I’m going to try to ride it out. But just in case, I’ll spread a tarp over the furniture and put earmuffs on the dogs.