Schwarzenegger was proud of his H1 Hummer back in the May ’93 issue of  PHR.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I stumbled upon this old PHR news item written by long-time automotive journalist, Scott Oldham. It tells the typical Hollywood tale of special entitlement, where a movie star—Arnold Schwarzenegger—is given royal treatment by a company—AM General—which then places the financial burden on the backs of its customers—in this case, the US Army, and, you guessed it, taxpayers.

What Oldham couldn’t have known when he wrote the piece is that AM General paid for that Hummer. I know this because my uncle worked at AM General at the time (he headed up the engineering team tasked with making it compliant with Federal standards), and worked on this very project. In fact, I drove a Corvette-powered Hummer just like this one at AM General’s Livonia, Michigan, headquarters around the same time.

Notice the bitterness in my tone? Now that Terminator’s the governor of California, he’s made the ultimate flip-flop, and teamed up with every environmental group he can find. His agenda? Eradicate fossil-fuel burning vehicles from the roads in a misguided attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Repeat after me: “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.” For the record, I don’t buy into global warming, namely because absolutely none of the global climate change over the last four billion years was caused by man. But that’s a different topic. Whether you believe in man-made climate change or not is immaterial to my argument: Schwarzenegger is a man who clearly practices the “do as I say” school of management, not the “do as I do,” model. The Flip-flopinator is a jet-setting, energy-swilling hedonist who once again is making those of us in California carry his water, while he and his entourage cruise in comfort.