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Some time ago, I wrote a post about our larger-than-life governor, Chris Christie.  Last Thursday, I watched him waffling and weaseling about Bridgegate.  Sure, his aide might have ordered the traffic problems with the GW Bridge as payback all by her lonesome (in the press conference, he fired her).  As the mayor of Fort Lee (featured prominently in my novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, by the way) stated, it’s hard to imagine that someone would engineer such a payback in the first place and then be so stupid to leave an email trail.

I originally thought same-sex marriage would break the Big Man in Trenton, but this might be the real bye-bye to his hopes for representing the GOP in the presidential elections.  Let’s say it like it is: the action was nasty and illegal, traffic was tied in knots, and a 90-year-old woman died because paramedics couldn’t get to her (her relatives claim it wouldn’t have mattered, but they’re not doctors).  Christie’s aide will fall on the sword in an attempt to take the heat off her boss, but his reputation as a bipartisan wunderkind is damaged.  Whether he ordered the payback or not, he hired that aide, so he’s responsible.

I call this Bridgegate because, on a local level, it’s as important as Watergate.  Nixon was headed for a landslide; so was Christie.  Yet both were associated with criminal behavior (Christie’s direct involvement to be determined).  Bridgegate makes the statement that the Republican establishment in NJ makes its own rules and pays back those Dems and Independents who dare confront them.  The mayor of Fort Lee was singled out because he endorsed Barbara Buono.  Were other mayors singled out?  Or, was all this just a maniacal wielding of power that backfired?  Irrational exuberance among some naïve aides?

This all started with four days of lane closures and detouring of traffic into Fort Lee.  On December 6, David Waldstein, Christie’s friend in Port Authority (a tri-state organization) resigned to quiet the scandal.  He had been called to testify to an inquiry and took the fifth.  That wasn’t enough with the recent revelation of emails.  Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff, was fired, and Bill Stepien, two-time campaign manager for Christie and thick with the Guv was asked to withdraw from his posts also.  A U.S. District Attorney will investigate.

I really don’t care who’s responsible.  The whole scandal reeks of effluent from the GOP’s nasty mentality.  It’s a party controlled by irrational, narcissistic, egotistical, bullying, and bigoted minds, from Texas to North Dakota and from the Jersey Shore to Malibu.  We’re not talking ideology here.  I can’t give the party or its platform that much of a pass.  We’re talking small-minded viciousness.  Moreover, these are not conservatives.  I’ve known true conservatives.  It’s natural sometimes to error on the side of caution because the law of unintended consequences can bite anyone on the butt—that’s conservatism.  We all know the feeling in many life situations: Take your time, reflect on the issues, test the water before you jump in.  That’s conservatism.

No, Christie and company are just bullies.  They can join the ranks with Rand Paul’s lack of appreciation of the plight of the unemployed and Ted Cruz’ filibuster that brought us to the brink of national defaultas as representatives of how nasty the GOP has become as it desperately tries to overcome the new demographics and the rise of progressive populists.  Christie is, in fact, an example of jumping from the frying pan to the fire.  Corzine was not well liked in NJ, even by the teachers’ union, and the voters turned on him.  He’s probably looking pretty good right now in hindsight, although he turned to the Wall Street dark side.  Maybe we’re seeing the dark side of Christie even before he leaves office?  That’s probably just as well, before we elect him president and saddle the country with someone worse than Dubya.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  NJ politics—indeed, politics in the whole tri-state area, as the mayoral election in NYC just showed—is down and dirty.  It’s the land of the Sopranos, after all, of Wall Street bankers and union bosses, showing the whole spectrum of human behavior, from the sleaziest dumps and dives to the glittering lights on Broadway.  Plenty of novel writing material can be found here.  I’m not sure a character like Christie or his troop would be believable in a novel, though.  Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

And so it goes….

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 14th, 2014 at 4:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.