The year in Governor McDreamy

My Austrian Oak began the year with a broken leg and is ending it with a broken heart. The broken leg came as a result of a skiing trip late last year. The broken heart came as a result of the ink-stained dickwads.

I’ll start, as I do in my dreams, with Arnold’s leg. You’d think such an injury would turn him off to nature, make him abandon his environmental plank, say “Burn, baby, burn” to this global-warming “gossip.” Alas, that ain’t him.

After limping up to the podium at his January inaugural, his script’s plotline concerned environmental preservation and awareness. Fuel-cell cars ushered VIPs around downtown Sacramento, a 20-foot aquarium decorated the north steps of the Capitol and exhibitors passed out organic veggies to schoolkids outside the Rotunda. All that was missing was Butterfly camped in a Capitol park tree.

But, in an ominous sign of the challenges Schwarzy’s bold governance would face in ’07, slack-jawed journos used his inauguration to re-report how, mere months earlier, the guv had vetoed bills to require more California cars and trucks to run on clean alternative fuels; fund pollution-prevention at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; and restructure state oversight of development projects and land use.

The explanation for this was right in front of their smirking faces. The Legislature pushed this crap on Arnold, obviously ignoring his grander vision, his Sustainability Lebensraum, if you will. Look, in 2006, the big lug established his green-street cred by signing the Global Warming Solutions Act into law. They should have let Arnold be Arnold after that. Instead, the media pooh-poohs his veto of high-speed rail funding, painting it as hypocritical to his supposed green agenda. Wrong! Our Everyman governor decided to put the matter up for vote so the people—and the push pollsters and right-wing talk radio and slick anti-rail marketing campaigners—can decide. That, meiner freunden, is leadership with a capital l-e-a-d!

Given the access my fellow pen-pushers have versus my own lack thereof, I don’t understand why they can’t see Mr. Olympia as I do. No deadline nor unreturned phone call nor cordoned-off workspace nor security task force nor restraining order has kept me from becoming California’s leading strumpet that trumpets the pride of Thal Bei Graz, Austria. I’ve knocked back critics of his action/non-action on medical marijuana, same-sex marriage, a knotted state budget, California condor protection and that oldie but goodie, universal health care—which would be solved by now if they’d just called it universal machine health care. Arnold’s never met a piece of gym equipment he didn’t master.

Protecting my man has meant calling out Sacramento Bee stump of a syndicated columnist Dan Walters (for accusing my studmuffin of having a “boundless self confidence bordering on narcissism”); Walters’ only source, hardcore conservative state Sen. Tom McClintock (or Tom McClincock as I call him, for stabbing his supreme leader in the back for allegedly lacking principles); and, most of all, meiner liebkind’s nincompoop hairdresser (for … tangerine? Come on! That’s the same color as his skin. Contrast, contrast!!!)

The pressure intensified in December, with ungrateful pundits and politicos refusing to accept Schwarzensnookum’s Christmas presents: an agreement with Dems on universal health care and the early release of 22,000 inmates from California’s overstuffed prisons. Arnold shoulda given ’em socks.

Until that court order expires and we can at last be reunited for the first time, I’ll never know if my reporting has comforted the chief exec in his times of sorrow. Oh, how I’d love to be there now as he nurses his broken heart over the unprecedented negative coverage of his glut of campaign contributions ($125 million, the most in state history), his list of millionaires and billionaires who fund his lavish overseas trips and his staff’s lax bookkeeping on how he spent that donated loot.

It’s a scandal that would bring a weaker administration down. Won’t happen here, guys. Like me, only in more of a plutonic sense, the people love Schwarzenegger and his loosey-goosey—dare I say Reaganesque?—grip on governance. He will triumph like a spitfire. But what price to you, the media whore-eratti? How can you sleep at night? And you should stop and think about this the most: Can you slip him my number?