Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Meg Whitman, Yeah, She's Annoying











Meg Whitman, the 53-year-old, billionaire and former CEO of eBay is running as a Republican candidate for Governor of California and she's doing it with style. Well, a style. Some would say it's not a style but more of an annoying, repetitive and childish attack ad campaign. You know, style.



While, "Why can't we trust Steve Poizner?" was already my mantra, she didn't have to ruin it by incessantly pairing it with carney music. But let's take a look at what else the possible first female Governor of California's been up to:

Besides the attack ads, which I will expand upon later, she’s had two scandals so far. The first, concerning profiting from “spinning” which is when executives receive a portion of a third party company in exchange for attracting that company’s business to the broker. She earned $1.78 million. And then she paid $3 million back to eBay investors and resigned from the board of Goldman Sachs in 2002 after she was caught. Now, that's a return on your investment.

The second scandal was her lack of voting. On 9/30/09 “Whitman has acknowledged that her voting registration and voting record was ‘atrocious’ and apologized.”



On 10/5/09 she then stated in the Sacramento Bee, "While my voting record is nothing to be proud of, I have voted on numerous occasions.”

Her campaign then tried to combat her lack of voting habits by saying that it couldn’t find any voting information for California Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein during the 1980s. “But The Bee was able to find state records that dated Pelosi's San Francisco County voting registration to Feb. 12, 1987, something it could not do for Whitman. The state record shows Feinstein's current registration dates to 1995.” So she doesn't like to vote. I mean, it's not like voting has anything to do with being elected to office. Girl Power.

Concerning the negative campaign ads against Steve Poizner, she’s using mockery voice over along with that jokey carnival theme song style I mentioned earlier. The ads use the technique of numbering the reasons “Why we can’t trust Steve Poizner? Reason #12.” That’s right, they start at twelve and go to 29: 12, 13, 14, 16, 21, 29. But there are only 6 reasons and they duplicate and overlap and therefore there’s really only four. So you know she’s good at numbers.

The attack ad youtube channel is entitled “Can’tTrustSteve’s Channel” which seems more like a commentary on the Channel than on Steve himself.

Ads “Reasons 29” and “13” are both the same reason: taxes and he “weakened prop 13.” Which is a Prop concerning taxes. And “Reason 12” is only missing one of those components: it concerns taxes but this time Whitman compared him to Pelosi rather than bringing up Prop 13.

In “Reason 21” she pointed out that Poizner contributed to Al Gore’s 2000 Presidential campaign. But one could mention that Whitman contributed to Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer herself.

She also doesn’t mention that’s she’s a Republican in her ads. Because, this is California and we don't vote conservative. Yes on Prop 8 much?

At the very end of the main video on CantTrustSteve’s youtube channel it lists quotes on his tax record. One of the quotes says “Steve Poizner’s Taxing Record…” – Hogue News. So I went to that site and that’s the entire header on a section, it’s not the truncation of a sentence. The entire quote is “Steve Poizner’s Taxing Record…” This site calls itself “Hogue News Relevant, Contemporary and Uniquely Conservative.” The quote right next to the one mentioned above states “Is Poizner ‘Pro-tax’” – Hogue News. So I checked that one and it’s a portion of the headline wherein the subheader of “Steve Poizner’s Taxing Record…” appears. So they’re quoting the same headlines twice. Not even sentences, just portions of headlines.

But really the greatest scandal uncovered about Meg Whitman is the claim on her website which states that she “fell in love with California as a young girl. While Meg was born and raised in Long Island, New York,” she did spend “three months car-camping” here. Really, Meg Whitman? Did you really "fall in love" with California because I have evidence to the contrary. I believe that you fell in love with Steve Poizner as a little girl and have been chasing him ever since.

I mean, how else would you account for this: Whitman announced her candidacy in February 2009. So she’s been running over a year now, spending $19 million on her campaign in 2009 alone. And is currently winning in the polls for the Republican nomination. Meg Whitman for Governor, because she wants to hurt Steve Poizner just like he hurt her so very long ago.

1 comment:

eatmee said...

This is the worst day of my life. I fell in love with Steve Poizner as a little girl, too, but I know I can't compete with someone as ruthless as Meg Whitman.

Oh well, we could never get married anyway...

But seriously, you'll never get anywhere as a writer if you insist on fact checking. Our shared experience should have taught you that!