NICE RESPONSE, ARNOLD

Schwarzenegger’s response today to the smear campaign orchestrated by the liberal Los Angeles Times struck exactly the right note. In general, I believe the women in these cases. Almost always, the men have behaved badly. For the record, I believed Anita Hill (though I would still have supported Clarence Thomas for Supreme Court Justice); and I believed almost all the women who came forward to accuse Bill Clinton of sexual abuse and harassment. But there is a distinction here between illegal sexual harrassment and legal sexual grossness. There is a distinction between a named accuser and an anonymous one. There is a distinction between a public lawsuit and a private incident. And there is a distinction between public and private life, a distinction which we have now effectively abolished to the detriment of our entire civil compact. One of the best aspects of the Schwarzenegger candidacy is therefore that he might actually get to be governor of California, having used drugs, taken steroids, had group sex, said all sorts of outrageous things, and lived a lively and not-always admirable private life. Maybe he’ll prove that the smears can’t work any more. And because privacy is essentially over in this country for any public figures, Arnold’s path may be the only one we now have. So I’d say: vote against the Los Angeles Times. That means: vote for Arnold.