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Endorsed by Mel Gibson!

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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2006, at 7:02 PM ET

California state Sen. Tom McClintock must rue the day he met Mel Gibson. Gibson, it turns out, wrote a letter endorsing McClintock's run for lieutenant governor, and McClintock sent it out to potential contributors. After Gibson's drunk driving arrest, during which the actor famously ranted about "fucking Jews" and declared Jews "responsible for all the wars in the world," McClintock "made a conscious decision to direct people not to use the letter any further," according to campaign spokesman Stan Devereaux. (Is that perchance why the link on the bottom left corner of his campaign home page, "WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT TOM," isn't live?)

Now those resourceful scamps at the Smoking Gun and the San Francisco Chronicle have tracked down a copy and posted it for all to see. For his part, McClintock says he is "disillusioned" by Gibson's behavior. That sounds like faint criticism to me.

Then again, McClintock has a history of associating with religious intolerants. During the recall election, McClintock's deputy campaign manager and former chief legislative aide was found to have written that "Christians are the only people who can restore the proper biblical understanding of government to our modern system." Gibson's virulent anti-Semitism was, at the very least, a matter of strong suspicion well before his drunk-driving incident. Come to think of it, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose deputy McClintock aspires to become, has an awkward history here too, having defended Kurt Waldheim, secretary general of the United Nations and subsequently president of Austria, after it came to light that Waldheim had participated in Nazi atrocities (for instance, a mass murder in the Kozara region of western Bosnia) during World War Two.

Schwarzenegger, incidentally, dispatched his Nazi problem with astounding ease during the 2003 election, having earlier opened his heart to Rabbi Marvin Hier and his checkbook to Hier's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. "Every time he does a movie, he writes a check," Hier once explained.

Mel. Bubeleh. Are you paying attention?

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Pressure from any group in particular, Mel?
McClintock ran for governor in the 2003 recall election, losing to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Note that Gibson doesn't say which candidate he voted for; my guess is that he pulled the lever for his fellow movie star Schwarzenegger.
"and I'll probably do so less in the future..."
hot document
entries
123
from: Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2006, at 7:02 PM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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