A Fala Moment

Gumby just gave Arnold a great chance to show what a scumbag the governor is. He shouldn’t demand an apology–he should make a speech like Roosevelt did in his September ’44 address to the Teamsters:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him–at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars–his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself–such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

Here, I’ll do it for him:

Guffernor Davis is apparently not content to attack my ideas, or my plans to straighten out the mess in which he has left the formerly great state of Califfournia. I expected him to attack me as a Republican, and to make fun of my mooffy caareer, and my past asss a body builder, but making an issue of the pronunciation of our state, he isss no longer attacking me, but all uff the hardverking immigrants both here, and in thisss wonderful country. I don’t mind so much, but he isss now denigrating not just me, but all of those for whom English is not a native language, but one that we’ve embraced nonetheless bekawss vee know that it isss the vay to get ahead and to make our state and nation even greaaater.

He cannot defend his record, so instead he attacks my and othersss pronunciation asss he continues to raise millionsss from the special interests who have driven our state into a ditch.

It is a tactic of distraction. But I neither ask for, nor expect an apology. It isss in perfect keeping with the past campaign techniques and lies that allowed him to win reelection, despite his obvious and repeated failure as a governor.