OBLIGATORY RECALL POST

How honest would you like me to be on this thing? Totally? M'kay.

Gray should go. It would've been better had he gone down to Bill Simon, but he didn't thanks to the way he, a Democrat, rigged the GOP primary. So Dem symps can choke on that one--they keep harping about Republican power grabs all the while gerrymandering themselves seats they don't deserve in Texas and spoiling the primary of the other party in California. The Dems are, as a party, beneath contempt. They have a long history of figuring out who is currently America's number one enemy and siding with them, tacitly if not overtly. Sandanistas? Dems sided with them. Socialists in Europe who shilled for the USSR? Dems sided with them. Read Mona Charen's Useful Idiots if you don't believe me.

Who should replace Gray? Honestly, I can't say that I care much. I'd like McClintock for his ideas, but I don't like the way he piled on Ahnuld when the LA Times became the PR arm of the Democrats over the past week. If I were in CA, I'd either go for McClintock or Ahnuld--the latter, mostly just to spite the Dems and the LA Times. Newspapers should not get away with engineering October Surprises all the while covering up for the guy they like. They're no longer a legitimate part of the press when they do that, and might as well just print the Dems' talking points and call it "news."

That said, I'm not at all enthusiastic about an Ahnuld win. Not for the groping. Caddish behavior to be sure, but the Times slimed him with it and let it drip drip just to keep the story alive. So he gets more of my sympathy than my anger with all that. I just like him as a pol very much. He's barely a Republican--in fact, other than security issues it's hard to see how he is a Republican at all. Pro-abort, pro gun control, etc etc. Andrew Sullivan will undoubtedly blame it all on prudes if Ahnuld loses, but as usual Sulli is just being a blowhard smear artist too full of his own self-righteousness to see that people may have real, concrete reasons for opposing someone that he likes.

But I didn't come here to bash Sulli, fun as that might be.

I'd never vote for Bustamante. He's part of the problem. He's a life-long pol, once a member of a very questionable organization that from which he refuses to distance himself, and he just doesn't seem like he has any command of the facts or the situation. He couldn't manage to balkanize the Latino vote in sufficient numbers to get a life, which speaks poorly of him and well of the voters he failed to persuade. The day we lock in racial voting blocs is the day we start devolving into little statelets. Some liberals think that's a good idea. I don't. So Bustamante is a bust for me.

But all said, whoever wins gets a tar baby for their efforts. A lousy deficit situation and a Democrat legislature that will not countenance the real reforms that will be necessary. That legislature has been passing the awful bills--drivers licenses for illegal aliens at a time when we're fighting terrorists who will obviously use that benefit to kill people--that Davis has been signing lately. That legislature is a pathetic lefty gashouse. If you can't recall or at least tame it, you can't fix California. And they'll be neither tamed nor recalled as I see it.

So if Ahnuld wins, or McClintock, or Bustamante, what of it? It says little about the big political picture for 2004, unless the problems get solved by then--which they won't.

So...Recall Davis! Go Ahnuld! Or Go Tom! Whatever.