Tuesday, September 07, 2004

What Arnold really said

Jay writes:

The word debate was not in Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech!!!

"I finally arrived here in 1968. I had empty pockets, but I was full of dreams. The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon and Humphrey presidential race on TV."

Believing Blanton's & Ashton's post really got me flogged while arguing with a conservative. He pointed out my error and I was sorta embarrassed.


The Arnold Memory has come up before. Following is a commentary from one of the readers of the South Knox Bubba/West Knox Momma RNC blogathon:

Actually Arnold did say race.... this time. He has altered his lie for the convention.

"The Curious Nixon-Humphrey Debate
From Times Staff Reports

August 20, 2003

Fresh from Austria, a socialist country, Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to become a Republican after listening to "the debates of Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon when they were debating for the presidential race," or so he told television talk show host Bill O'Reilly in May 2001.

"Hubert Humphrey spoke about things I heard in Austria under socialism."

But there was no presidential debate in 1968. Although Humphrey challenged Nixon to a debate, Nixon, who won the election, demurred.

Schwarzenegger previously recounted his version of history during an interview at the 2000 Republican National Convention. "When I came to this country, I was sitting in front of the television set, and I watched a debate between Humphrey and Nixon, and I didn't even understand half of it because my English wasn't good enough then. I had a friend of [mine] translating"


...

He has repeated the same story to many journalists. Obviously somebody vetted his speech. Was he lying then? Obviously. Was he lying last night? Probably.

He lies, he gropes, he was drug user, recreational and steroids. Just the guy to represent the family values of the GOP. And this is the guy everybody wants to pass an amendment for?


And there's this about seeing tanks in the streets of his socialist home:

Whopper: Arnold Schwarzenegger
What were Soviet tanks doing in Austria's British-occupied sector?
ByTimothy Noah
Posted Friday, Sept. 3, 2004, at 3:56 PM PT

When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes. I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector. Growing up, we were told, "Don't look the soldiers in the eye. Look straight ahead." It was a common belief that Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him off to the Soviet Union as slave labor.

My family didn't have a car—but one day we were in my uncle's car. It was near dark as we came to a Soviet checkpoint. I was a little boy, I wasn't an action hero back then, and I remember how scared I was that the soldiers would pull my father or my uncle out of the car, and I'd never see him again. My family and so many others lived in fear of the Soviet boot. Today, the world no longer fears the Soviet Union and it is because of the United States of America!

As a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left. I love Austria and I love the Austrian people—but I always knew America was the place for me.


—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Aug. 31, 2004

"It's a fact—as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria," the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.

...Discussion. The AP story quotes Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Margita Thompson saying, "Never in there did the governor reference that the tanks were where he grew up. It was a reference to visiting Soviet-occupied Austria." But he sure as hell implied having lived on an everyday basis with both the risk and the reality of encountering Soviet goons.

...I can't let pass Schwarzenegger's smarmy implication that postwar socialism, to whatever extent it was practiced in Austria, was the legacy of Soviet occupation. There was and remains a big difference between European-style socialism and communism. The former boasts a long and proud tradition of anticommunism. That would have been especially true in Austria, where every chancellor between 1945 and 1970 was a conservative. The characteristic vice of Austrian conservatism isn't softness on communism. It's softness on Nazism.

More...


Jay, you're quite the optimist if you're still arguing with conservatives.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

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