re: #90 darthstar

Heh…Jerry Brown takes on Sarah Palin’s bullshit on Fox (I know, a lot of you don’t like Brown because he had a nickname of “moonbeam”…but the clip is still worth watching)…

[Video]

The moonbeam thing was always bullshit, he wanted and California eventually got an emergency communications satellite. We still use it, that was some forward thinking leadership and the guy who gave him the nickname later came to repudiate it:

The nickname was coined by Mike Royko, the famed Chicago columnist, who in 1976 said that Mr. Brown appeared to be attracting “the moonbeam vote,” which in Chicago political parlance meant young, idealistic and nontraditional.

The term had a nice California feel, and Mr. Royko eventually began applying it when he wrote about the Golden State’s young, idealistic and nontraditional chief executive. He found endless amusement — and sometimes outright agita — in California’s oddities, calling the state “the world’s largest outdoor mental asylum.”

“If it babbles and its eyeballs are glazed,” he noted in April 1979, “it probably comes from California.”

But as any New Age Californian can tell you, such hate is probably cover for a deeper love. And so it was with Mr. Royko, who after many vicious gibes at Mr. Brown’s expense offered an outright apology to the governor, and spent years trying to erase the moniker.

In a 1991 column in The Chicago Tribune, he called the label, an “idiotic, damn-fool, meaningless, throw-away line,” and pleaded with people to stop using it.

“Enough of this ‘Moonbeam’ stuff,” Mr. Royko concluded. “I declare it null, void and deceased.”