Let’s Check Out Gustavo’s (Chickenshit) Anaheim Council Endorsements from 2012

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If you really wanted to keep either of them from being elected, would you endorse ONLY Duane Roberts?

If you really wanted to keep either of them from being elected, would you endorse ONLY Duane Roberts? (Photo by Gabriel San Roman for the Weekly used without permission under Fair Use exceptions for criticism, given its being part of Gustavo’s original story.)

Gustavo Arellano, the libertarian-ish useful tool of opponents of rival OC Latino activists whom I’ve come to call “Buquer Ti Oashington” for his “up by your bootstraps” advice to his followers, has been bouncing around our comments section recently slamming people for their endorsements in the Anaheim City Council election that took place almost exactly three years ago this Friday.  Let’s return to those times and get a sense of what was being said at the time.  I’m going to quote the relevant portion of Buquer Ti’s  — uh, Gustavo’s — argument in full, both to kindly preserve its context for his benefit and to pull it apart.  The indented material is from Gustavo; the non-indented commentary is mine:

There is no municipal election that will grab more attention this year than Anaheim. This is the city, after all, that burned this past summer, whose officers have been shooting unarmed men for nearly a decade now, who’s currently facing a bullshit ACLU lawsuit demanding ward elections for the city council in the name of diversity and now has a pedophile-priest protector apologist smearing opponents of Dark Lord (and former mayor) Curt Pringle, who wants a dirty cop elected to City Council…where where we? Oh, yeah: THE MOUSE IS A LOUSE!

Wait, that’s a different issue.

(Sorry, I have to interrupt here: do you see that link about “a bullshit ACLU lawsuit demanding ward elections for the city council”?  If I had sided with Kris Murray back when it mattered most, I don’t think I’d want to talk about the 2012 Anaheim elections at all!  But Gustavo just counts on people having a short memory.)

Anyhoo, the races!

(San Ramon’s photo, used above, appeared here.)

CITY COUNCIL

This is the one that will determine the future of Anaheim, and probably the last one run in a non-ward race, and I think it’s perfectly emblematic of everything that’s wrong with Anaheim–essentially, it’s a race of clowns save for one amazing candidate that will probably not win because everyone is against him for selfish reasons.

“Will determine the future of Anaheim!”  Sounds like a pretty important race if the stakes are that high, huh?  A time, in fact, to figure out how one can get the best result possible, with so much hanging in the balance!  Keep reading to be surprised (or not).

But first, the idiots: the presumed front-runners are current Anaheim Union High School District Trustee Jordan Brandman and former councilwoman Lucille Kring. Brandman is little more than a slimy weenie–he’s the ultimate teacher’s pet of OC politics, someone who sucks up to Democrats and Republicans alike, and the worst ones, at that: Democratic Party of Orange County chair Frank Barbaro for the Dems, and Pringle for the GOP. He’s probably going to get one of the council seats and immediately be a weenie, trying to appear to appease everyone but really just using the seat to bolt to state assembly once his mentor, former mayor Tom Daly (whom we once named one of the weakest people in Orange County–like mentor, like ward!), finishes his presumptive term (he’s running this year).

Pretty comprehensive slam there!  Of course, he was wrong about Brandman trying to appease everyone.  Still, Gustavo seems alarmed enough to be motivated to block him.

All you need to know about Brandman is that he’s willing to be associated with Steve Lodge, the dirty SanTana cop who decided to be Mexican this election and will thusly appear on the ballot as Steve Chavez Lodge. It seems Anaheim voters have picked him out for who he is–a douchebag carpetbagger–and his campaign signs have been defaced like no other local candidate since Tan Nguyen.

Again, it’s pretty clear that Gustavo really doesn’t want this pair to win.

Lucille Kring, on the other hand, is opposed to Brandman and the Pringle machine. I remember talking to her back when I was a cub reporter, and she struck me than as level-minded. That was before I discovered she’s a Know Nothing who once supported the reprehensible Lupe Moreno–really, Lucille? Her main opponent for the second seat, John Leos, is part-Mexi and says all the right things, but he’s a Republican, which means we must question his sanity.

So Gustavo likes the fact that Kring was opposed to the “Pringle machine” — this would have been the place to say otherwise, if he wanted to — but doesn’t like the fact that she’s anti-immigrant.  Tom Tait surely didn’t like the latter either, but he calculated the odds and decided to endorse Kring — who immediately betrayed him by, once on Council, turning into Steve Lodge without the ability to beat people to a pulp.  This was so totally audacious a betrayal that Tait didn’t expect it; it follows that others less in the know should not be held to a higher standard.

As for Leos: he “says all the right things” but “he’s a Republican” — like Tait and many other prominent Pringle critics — so … he might be crazy?  OK — but as you read those paragraphs don’t you get the sense that Gustavo had a preference between the Brandman/Lodge ticket and Kring and Leos?  If so, wouldn’t someone who wanted to keep the former off of City Council support Kring and Leos even if (at least in Kring’s case) it was apprehensively and grudgingly?

As for the rest of the candidates? No one knows who Linda Linder, Jennifer Rivera, or Rudy Gaona is, and Brian Chuchua, while a nice guy, has no chance. And then we’re left with the only city council candidate in all of OC that is truly awesome: Duane Roberts.

Note that one has two protest votes for City Council, if one wanted to cast them, so Chuchua’s having “no chance” shouldn’t have mattered.  Or rather, it would matter only if it got into the way of a good story.  What constitutes a good story about Anaheim for Gustavo?  If you had to pick one word, wouldn’t it be: “Gigante”?

Roberts is a longtime Anaheim activist, and the one person who will blast everyone and anyone in the name of political truth. Los Amigos despises him because he once outed their carpetbagging efforts to get a Latino elected to the Anaheim City School District and opposed their pathetic shilling for Mexican multinational Gigante. Republicans hate him for his long campaigns against Pringle and all the other losers the GOP has inflicted on OC over the years. Cops hate him because he’s been monitoring their brutalizing ways for years.

 

So who supports Duane? Anyone who wants the one honest man in Orange County–he’s a pinche Unitarian Universalist, for chrissakes. He’s proof-positive that calls for diversity in council chambers are bullshit, because said Latino yaktivists would rather want a vendido than this mensch. Although this paper doesn’t officially endorse, I will personally tell all 500 or so of my cousins who live in Anaheim to vote for Duane. He’ll probably lose, because OC can never vote the right people in office, but any young folks looking to apprentice under a master of raising hell should–it worked for me!

Wow — doesn’t that seem like a real cop-out, if the stakes are so high?  Was there any reasonable alternative?  Let’s see what Vern said in his endorsements:

The defining struggle this year in Anaheim, is much different – will Orange County’s largest city break free of its complete political control by local corporate interests – Disney, the resorts and developers, and above all ex-Mayor / master lobbyist / puppeteer Curt Pringle.  And that means cutting down the Pringle-ites’ current three-member council majority to two.  And that essentially comes down to, what we always say, DEFEATING JORDAN BRANDMAN Keeping Pringle candidate Jordan Brandman off the Council.

Otherwise none of Mayor Tait’s reforms will move forward this year:  “Letting the people vote” on future corporate subsidies;  Moving to district-style elections and settling the ACLU suit;  and forming a citizens’ oversight committee to keep the police in line.  So, like I said in my last Anaheim article, Democrats and progressives who want to vote for the candidates who most reflect their values should NOT vote for “Democrat” Brandman, but for Duane Roberts and John Leos;  while if you want to be more pragmatic and pick the two candidates who are MOST LIKELY to beat Brandman, you should go for the Mayor’s choice: Leos and Lucille Kring.

Sounds pretty reasonable.  Vern supported Leos (even over his good friend Brian Chuchua), for both pragmatists and protest voters, in hopes of keeping Brandman off of City Council.  As (to his credit) did Gustavo, Vern also supported Tait — who, despite being Republican, was not accused of being possibly insane, something that Gustavo apparently thought could only apply to Latino Republicans.  (Nice!)  For protest voters, Vern also supported Roberts — but for people who really cared about electing a Council intent on endorsing the Mayor’s policies, he reluctantly went with Kring as his choice for a second candidate.

For this, Gustavo calls Vern a “fanboy.”

I call Gustavo a pinche pendejo, because with the future of Anaheim on the line he was not really inclined to support the Mayor’s candidate over the former Mayor’s candidate.  Instead, he chose to pretend that he could rise above it all and not take a stand — despite that the stakes were obviously high and the choice was obviously clear.

Well — at least he may have helped bring in enough votes to put Roberts over the top, right?  Let’s check those results for evidence of Gustavo’s power and influence!

JORDAN BRANDMAN 26,332 19.3%
LUCILLE KRING 25,464 18.7%
JOHN LEOS 19,051 14.0%
JENNIFER RIVERA 14,091 10.3%
STEVEN ALBERT CHAVEZ LODGE 13,834 10.1%
LINDA LINDER 13,456 9.9%
BRIAN NEIL CHUCHUA 9,534 7.0%
RODOLFO “RUDY” GAONA 7,703 5.6%
DUANE ROBERTS 6,914 5.1%

… Or maybe not.

Look — politics sometimes involves making some disturbing choices.  (This is especially when the most prominent Latino writer in the County spends his time crapping all over the very sorts of Latino political figures that — in most other places — help to raise up good people who may run for Council.  Who celebrates, do you think, when Gustavo pisses all over Los Amigos?)  When the time to make those decisions comes, someone like Vern will suck it up and take a stand — even if with some compunctions and regrets.  Gustavo won’t — and didn’t.

Sitting on the sidelines is not actually something to be proud of.  And attacking someone else because he didn’t — because he wanted to support the tactical decisions of a reformist Mayor — that’s just pinche insane.  Much, much worse than anything that happened a decade earlier regarding Gigante — the only thing Gustavo chooses to remember, because it was the only time he did take a stand and lost.


About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)