Why Maidgate hurts Nutmeg

Blogger’s note: My home computer has been out for more than a week now (I’m in the process of getting it repaired), so my blogging has been light as of late.

Associated Press photo

With Maidgate, billionaire Repugnican Nutmeg Whitman (pictured above with her husband on Thursday at a news conference over Maidgate) most likely has lost the California gubernatorial contest, thank Goddess.

This past week’s big political news in California has been the revelation that billionaire Repugnican gubernatorial candidate Megalomaniac Whitman employed an undocumented Mexican housekeeper for nine years.

This has come as no big shock to me, knowing what I know of Nutmeg Whitman, but this has rocked California.

There have been allegations and excuses aplenty, with Nutmeg, without any proof, ultimately blaming the Jerry Brown campaign, of course* (because Jerry Brown forced Nutmeg to keep an undocumented worker on board for almost a decade, and because Jerry Brown forced the housekeeper to appear at a press conference with her attorney, Gloria Allred, outing herself as being in the nation illegally, you see).

My money is on the probable fact that Megalomaniac long knew, or always knew, of her housekeeper’s citizenship status but that she didn’t care, since she was getting cheap slave labor, and that Megalomaniac fired the housekeeper only once she (Megalo) knew that she was going to run for governor. And my best guess is that billionaire bully Nutmeg had thought that she had her former housekeeper so intimidated that her housekeeper would keep her mouth shut. (I mean, billions of dollars can buy you an awful lot, can’t they?)

There is no argument as to whether or not Megalomaniac Whitman employed a non-citizen as her housekeeper for almost a decade — this is established fact — and the argument now is whether or not Nutmeg knew of her housekeeper’s citizenship status.

But, whether Nutmeg knew of her indentured servant’s citizenship status or not, I can’t see how Maidgate can help Team Nutmeg.

First of all, only a handful of us economically depressed Californians can afford to hire maids or servants, so the fact that Nutmeg is served by maids only underscores the fact that indeed, Nutmeg is not one of us.

Another pundit correctly pointed out that it isn’t flattering to Nutmeg that, from the nag’s own mouth, she would have someone in her close employ for almost a decade but know so little about her. (But, of course, Nutmeg is probably just lying that she didn’t know.)

I watched MSNBC’s pundit Andrea Mitchell and Politico’s pundit Andrew Barr basically assert, from the ivory towers of the East Coast, that Maidgate probably won’t hurt Megalomaniac, but, having lived in the great state of California for 12 years now and knowing something of its politics, I have to advise Mitchell and Barr not to presume to know jack shit about my state from the other side of the continent.

Minimally, Maidgate has thrown Team Nutmeg way off course with just a month until election day on November 2.

Jerry Brown is fairly well known among Californians, except perhaps primarily among the younger ones who aren’t up on their state’s political history, but Nutmeg always has faced a rather uphill battle to get herself known in the state (indeed, she has spent more of her own money than any other candidate for any elected office in U.S. history to get herself known in the state), and offering to take a lie-detector test over Maidgate in the last month of her campaign is not where Team Nutmeg wants to be right now, I assure you.

Team Nutmeg also has needed the Latino vote, and images of Nutmeg’s former housekeeper, Nicky Diaz Santillan, crying at a Wednesday news conference called by her lawyer — 

Associated Press photos

— and alleging that Nutmeg and her husband treated her like dirt (which is credible, given the fact that we know that Nutmeg paid off an eBay employee $200 grand for having physically assaulted her) is not the way to get the Latino vote.

I don’t expect Maidgate to cost Nutmeg the already-solid support of her fellow Richie Riches and the white supremacist wingnuts (a.k.a. “tea partiers”). Nutmeg’s fellow billionaires and millionaires see no problem in having maids and servants or in mistreating them, and Nutmeg’s white supremacist followers don’t give a rat’s ass about brown-skinned Latinos.

But billionaires and millionaires and “tea party” dipshits are a minority in California and they aren’t enough to push Nutmeg to victory.

Nutmeg has needed the crucial “swing voters,” the politically retarded dipshits in the middle whose votes can be bought by millions of dollars worth of television commercials — indeed, Nutmeg has been working for months and has been spending tens of millions of dollars to get the crucial votes of these dipshits — and with Maidgate, methinks, she has lost this critical voting bloc.

With California’s gubernatorial election only a month away, it’s pretty safe to call the election for Democrat Jerry Brown.

Buh-bye, Nutmeg.

Thanks for playing.

Too bad that you pissed that more than $120 million down the drain.

P.S. Nutmeg Whitman of course is not the first rich Californian Repugnican politician to have illegally employed non-citizens while blasting non-citizens for political gain. The Los Angeles Times notes:

California too has revisited similar situations time and again. In 1994, the state fought its way through a debate over Proposition 187, the measure that would have denied most taxpayer-financed government services, including schools, to illegal immigrants.

That year, a Senate race between incumbent Dianne Feinstein and Republican challenger Mike Huffington [ex-husband of Arianna Huffington who since has come out of the closet as a gay man] exploded when he was found to have knowingly employed an undocumented nanny. The matter went nuclear because Huffington had argued that he would be tougher than Feinstein on illegal immigrants.

A year later, while preparing to run for president, then-Gov. Pete Wilson was stung by reports that he too had once employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. [Repugnican] Wilson, now the campaign chairman for Whitman, had been the chief proponent of Proposition 187….  

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*Brown’s response to Nutmeg’s blaming him for Maidgate was: “Don’t run for governor if you can’t stand up on your own two feet. You have blamed her [Nicky Diaz Santillan], blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions. But you don’t take [any] accountability [for yourself].”