A Letter to the Governator

Dear Arnold,

You sure showed Tom Ammiano how clever a governor can be. Sure, he shouldn’t have called you a liar (even though it’s true) or told you to kiss his gay ass, and you shouldn’t have been at that Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco anyway—but your pal Willie Brown invited you and since you’re not doing anything in Sacramento these days, you dropped in and got a predictable response.

So when you stopped bluffing about vetoing all the bills this year (but it was a really cool bluff, cuz it came from you) and signed some of them, you vetoed a minor bill authored by Ammiano and sent him a custom veto letter that was so clever that the letters on the left margin spelled “Fuck you”. This is the coolest, most clever F-bomb since the pop group April Wine released the song “If You See Kay” back in the ‘80’s, your steroids-and-groping decade. You and the frat boys in your office must’ve spent hours crafting the letter and admiring it, and I’ll bet you did it all on a furlough day so taxpayers weren’t pinched by it.

And it was so cool that you resisted the urge to call Ammiano a “girly man”, since he’s about the only member of the legislature who would take it as a compliment. The editorial writers at the San Francisco Chronicle weren’t that cool—the left margin of their editorial slamming your F-bomb spelled out “grow up, girlyman” which is just so, well, 2005.

What’s even cooler is that you have been sodomizing California’s Democrats on just about a daily basis since the summer of 2008. Since our real Governor, Grover Norquist, wouldn’t allow the GOP members of the legislature to work with you to resolve the budget crisis that you created when you killed the car tax on your first day in office (way cool–$26 billion cool!) you managed to get the Democrats to bend over and take it—leading up to the May special election. The Dems acted like your sex slaves—telling us that unless we approved that 6-pack of poison, that life as we know it would cease. The voters are smarter than you all reckoned, and rejected your “solutions” because they knew they were phony.

So then you spent the summer in Sacramento (not cool) and alienated most of the legislators by demanding an all-cuts budget with massive disinvestment in education and a clever offshore oil drilling scheme that didn’t generate much money and showed us that your concern about climate change is just an act from a bad actor.

And after the Democrats survived all-nighters and gave in to virtually all of your demands, you screwed them again with line-item vetoes of programs like domestic violence hotlines, even though you didn’t have the power to do so. Now that’s really clever and very cool—you rock, dude! Who needs a legislature or even a constitution when you’ve got power derived solely from ego?

Over the next 5 to 10 years, as we struggle to repair the considerable damage that you’ve done to California and its most vulnerable people, we will marvel that you were so clever, and so cool as you imposed disaster capitalism on California, dismantled Pat Brown’s dreams and left the rubble to his moonbeam son.

Your stint as governator may be your only foray into politics; I hope so. But I expect that you will let Carly Fiorina run against Boxer as the Republican, and jump in as an independent in the general, and hope that you can write a script that covers your massive failures to date. And we will scour that script carefully for crude and cryptic messages in the left margin.