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Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Cassandra Tweets Christie


MSNBC pundits are crowing in a row about Christie's "bridge to nowhere..." I just heard Kathleen Parker declare there that Christie is in trouble because "nobody likes a bully." But, of course, Parker knows as well as anybody that her party, the whole Republican party, is now little more than one long drawn out howl of bullying, white-racist hatred and punching down and austerian cruelty and patriarchal punishment. Unless this can stick in a way that exposes a half year drip drip of corruption stories or leads to actual charges, I'm afraid the liberal lip smacking is premature.

2 comments:

jimf said...

Except the issue goes beyond just "bullying" into deliberately
endangering people in order to pursue a petty political
vendetta.

There are two possibilities:

1. Christie really didn't have a clue what was happening,
and it was something his aides cooked up. (I find this
implausible.) In that case, his total lack of control
and his unwillingness to take earlier allegations seriously
demonstrate negligence in office.

2. Christie knew very well what was going on. This goes
beyond just negligence into outright Nixonian malevolence.

In either case, he's culpable, and for more than just
"bullying".

Maybe after the Netflix Kevin Spacey _House of Cards_
remake finishes, we'll get a "House of Christie" sequel.

Dale Carrico said...

Strictly speaking, austerian fiscal policy and pre-emptive militarism and forced pregnancy zealotry go beyond bullying to active harm and avoidable death in that sense as well. And, face it, these are the bread and butter of the contemporary GOP. My point is that this kind of bad behavior plays better among wingnuts than it does among sane decent people. Unless Christie is revealed as a co-conspirator in some sense, despite his categorical denials as recently as the press conference he is delivering as I am writing this, I think he may well weather this. There are lots of people on the left and on the right who want Christie to go down (count me among them) and who will keep this ugly for a long time, and in a way that may indeed spoil Christie's chances at the 2016 Republican nomination for the Presidency. But I just want to say again that one of the problems Christie has faced was that he is seen as an Obama coddling moderate by the wingnut base (because they are crazy), and that it remains unclear if this episode will ultimately be a liability or an asset in the face of that problem. I still think that is true, even though it has seemed so far that Obama derangement among wingnuts has attached to Christie such that their attacks on him have been more forceful than I expected them to be. I don't know how this story ends.