Frank Rich says Arnold campaign Disney-like: sterile, fake, paternalistic

[SpaceCatMeetsMars]

This article makes me think of how infantile so much in this country seems, especially the news media and the entertainment media too. What are your thoughts?

snip

"Mr. Schwarzenegger's credo was laid out quite specifically in his autobiography, "Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder": "A certain amount of people are meant to be in control. Ninety-five percent of the people have to be told what to do, have to be given orders."

This philosophy, which he has repeated elsewhere and never retracted, sums up his politics far more than conventional conservative-vs.-liberal, Republican-vs.-Democrat paradigms. The budget deficit? Failing public schools? Mr. Schwarzenegger will make things right by terminating the malefactors from on high; let the other 95 percent of "the people" get out of the way. What was the plan? "Hasta la vista, car tax!" Such know-nothingness is not Nazism; it's too idea-free even to qualify as fascism-lite. What the Arnold platform really amounted to was a steroid-inflated codification of the trust-me paternalism of Disney's Celebration.

A side effect of Mr. Schwarzenegger's campaign was that it so successfully wiped out distinctions between reality and its theme-park simulation that few, including the news media, could delineate one from the other by the end."

snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/arts/12RICH.html?pagewanted=1

On edit: Also, has anyone else ever visited the above-mentioned Celebration, Disney's town? It truly is a creepy place!

[AP]

1. "5% telll 95% what to do." A nice metaphor for an election in which the

guy who won came in second place and won the election. So, what are the final numbers? About 45% voted for Arnold in the second part of the ballot, but more people either voted No-Anyone Else or No-Arnold then voted Yes-Arnold. Sounds like a world in which about 40% of Americans tell 60% what to do. But, I'm sure we'll get closer and closer to the 5 : 95 ratio so long as we have a couple Nazi-sympathizers running the national and CA governments.

[VeniceBeat]

2. All Hail Der Gropenfuhrer!

He had the best Hollywood above and below-the-liners money could buy!

I loved the Sacramento Nuremberg Rally! Twisted Sister ROCKED!

The broom was a nice, corny touch!

Ein Reich!

[barbaraann]

3. For tinfoilhatters: Google for: Disney mind control

Purely for entertainment purposes, of course! :-)

[Dudley_DUright]

4. I have been to Celebration

Nice place to visit (some good shops and restaurants), but I would not want to live there.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

5. Celebration is a nice little.......

shithole!!! That place frightens me!!! Disneyworld/land is frightning too!!!

Edit: Who the hell would want to live in a "planned community"???
You do as you are told! Your house must be a certain way,
no lights can be burnt out on your house and they use chemical
crap to keep the lawns looking green!

:puke:

[SpaceCatMeetsMars]

9. Someone told me a funny story about his trip to Disneyworld

He said his kids begged him and his wife to take them there and at the end of each day, they would hand the over-excited kids over to some kind of babysitter or something and go to this bar where they sat in a pool. And he said there was this weird, controlled atmosphere there where he felt like all the frazzled parents were thinking, "GIMME A STIFF DRINK RIGHT NOW!" but pretending they didn't really feel like that.

I pictured him and his wife laughing and being real, but some of the other people being rather tense and humorless and trying to put up some kind of front for their images of themselves.

[Eloriel]

6. I am so sad to see so many people assume that Arnold

actually won this thing. I don't know that he did. I think there were enough "anomalies" that, given what ELSE we know about computerized voting, puts the whole election in question.

Check out this initial analysis by Faun Otter:
http://whitestarwebsitedesign.com/bbvreport/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=64

Tulare county use Diebold Opti-Scan equipment.
Tulare county gave 'obscure' candidates high percents of their state wide totals:

Palmieri - 995 out of 3,717 26.77%
Platform was 'don't vote for me or the recall'. Gay Rights activist who lives in LA.

Kunzman - 694 out of 2,133 32.54%
Lives north of Oakland and favored increased social programs. Said he would fire all school custodians to save money and have the kids empty the trash and clean the carpets.

Sprague - 546 out of 1,576 34.64%
Zero tolerance for discrimination. Lives near Sacramento

McClain - 46 out of 2,463 1.77%
Civil engineer, Berkley grad living in Bay Area

These were not local candidates. The 'local candidate effect' can be seen with Doctor Macaluso from Visalia in Tulare county. He got 7.2% of his state wide total vote from his home county.

As a percentage of the votes counted as of the time I ran this analysis, Tulare votes were 0.9% of the state total. For comparison, in the 2002 fall election, the county gave Bustamante 24,647 votes which has dropped to 15,487 even with an increase in votes cast from 61,884 to 68,891. Stats prove nothing but this strikes me as strong evidence for the need for an audit.

======================
That was just one county. I'm not at all convinced the Recall didn't fail or that Arnold won.

Eloriel

[dsc]

7. Arnold won

it is simply ludicrous to suggest that that many votes were stolen. He got well over 1.5 times as many votes as Bustamente did. I could see the recall margin being able to have been stolen but not the second part.

[VeniceBeat]

8. What's Up with the 3 Million Absentee Ballots?

And the Military Ballots? And Provisional Ballots?

Did they just get dumped in the round file to let the goosestepping begin?