Some statements are facts. Some are opinions. And some are harder to place in between. Take this Meg Whitman quote pulled from George Skelton’s column this morning:
Every year, we pay more to sustain an out-of-control state bureaucracy — a wasteful bureaucracy, out of touch with the needs of Californians. And a selfish and arrogant bureaucracy, unwilling to give an inch even in the toughest of economic times.(LAT 10/05/09)
Now, Skelton does a pretty good job of pinning this on Whitman, the column is actually titled “The arrogance may be Whitman’s.” Now, I think I would change “may be” to “is”, but that’s very newspaper-y. Wouldn’t want to leave yourself without some weasel room in case she wins, and all.
Nonetheless, can it be said that there was a more arrogant statement than this? About a group that has taken pay cuts of between 10-20% from salaries which, despite the right-wing rhetoric to the contrary, really never were that high in the first place.
And to further undercut her point, just take a look at the union negotiations. SEIU Local 1000 agreed to some pretty big sacrifices in their latest deal with the Governor, only to have the deal blocked by Whitman’s ideological cronies, the Senate Republicans.
And then looking at the general frame of her point, that the bureaucracy is out of touch. First, may I remind her that the boogeyman of the day, the bureaucracy is actually made up of thousands of real, living, breathing Californians. Californians who fight fires, Californians who staff prisons, Californians that help the disabled and educate our youth. Yes, those arrogant, arrogant, firefighters. How dare they want to be compensated for risking their lives for us? And this from a CEO who made millions off of slave labor at Mattel, and then leveraged that into billions at eBay, warts and all. I’m sure she was cutting her salary at every opportunity there. After all, to do otherwise would be “selfish and arrogant.” And to just prove that she is the one out of touch with Californians, she hasn’t bothered to vote in 20 years.
The fact is that Meg Whitman is knowingly lying, while at the same time showing just how ill-informed an unprepared she is for the job. She is knowingly lying when she says that state workers haven’t given anything back. But when you dig deeper into the rhetoric, you see the emperor really has no clothes. When asked how she would cut the state workforce by 200,000, she simply states that she would blue pencil appropriations for which she doesn’t have authority over until they cut staff.
So the tech CEO wants to cut higher education until professors are fired. She wants to cut courts until trials are unconstitutionally slow. She’s just going to cut and slash her way through what is left, so that we will pine for the days of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pretty scary huh?
Sometimes attributed to Ben Franklin–Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Republicans seem to think that cutting more will finally get the results their prior efforts have failed to achieve. They never, never, never admit cuts have failed. So, not only is Whitman a liar, by Franklin’s definition, she’s also insane.
I really hope she is the candidate. After Arnold, who could have thought it could get worse? And yet there she is.
I’d say furloughs have put them quite in touch with every day Californians, the ones losing their jobs and worrying about what will happen next.
I wonder when the last time it was Meg had to make ends meet for her family on $50k a year, tapping no other assets.