CHRIS CHRISTIE OVER-INDULGES ON HIS OWN IMAGE: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CANNIBALIZE THE TRUTH? THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS
By JOHN F. McCARTHY
MODERATE VOICE COLUMNIST
Is there a smoking traffic cone in Bridgegate?
The taint of a brown burn mark on the bright orange plastic yet?
And if there is - will it hurt Chris Christie's chances to be elected President in 2016?
So few national op-ed columnists have weighed in on the New Jersey Governor's plight ...
that I thought I'd take a flying bridge leap (a Tony Scott if you will) at it myself.
Dirty tricks - or as they're called in the Virgin Islands - "politricks" - are nothing new.
Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon made a career out of them - long before he even imagined the Checkers Speech and a run at the White House. What's new about Chris Christie's take on them is that THE JOKE IS ON THE PEOPLE WHO VOTED FOR HIM.
When Nixon's "plumbers" sprung a leak at the Watergate complex - at least the plan in motion at the time was to muck up the competition - meaning the Democrats.
So it was poor planning on Chris Christie's henchmen (and women’s) part because - as DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said about the dirty tricks backfiring over the bridge – “it was directed at his own constituents.” Instead of shock and awe - what they got was a "Joisey" toxic spill of "mock and ow!"
Here’s what Governor Christie and his staff missed by not first reading the trademark yellow and black book "Dirty Tricks for Dummies": "Chapter One: The dirty trick is always played PRIOR to an election. Chapter Two: The dirty trick is always played ON a political opponent, NOT ON THE POLITICIAN’S OWN CONSTITUENTS. Chapter Three: The object of playing the dirty trick is to allow the player to win by an even greater margin. And most importantly, Chapter Four: The dirty trick is never, ever played AFTER an election." After all, what would be the point?
Richard Nixon had the 1972 Presidential election sewn up - and in the bag - well before the fiasco that would become known as the "Anybody but McGovern" campaign (which was "covered" forty years later [in the musical meaning of that word] in an homage by the "Anybody but Romney" campaign in 2012. Only two states went for George then, Massachusetts and South Dakota, but only one of them counted in the electoral college. But Mr. Milhouse’s paranoia ran deep – and mixed with his serious character issues – caused Nixon to want to ensure the greatest landslide of all time.
So what were Christie’s staff (the Governor has officially denied all knowledge of the “Fort Lee Lane Closure” scandal – as it is called on Wikipedia – to date) hoping to achieve by purposely snarling traffic on the world’s busiest bridge? Is this how you reward the “cross-over” voters who put you in office two times in a row? And if Chris Christie didn’t know about the scandal until we were 24-hours into it – how is it that he admitted to having two sleepless nights prior to be informed of it?
The answers to these and other questions might be blowing in the wind – or sweeping across the George Washington Bridge at this very moment. To believe that Chris Christie was not complicit in this ham-fisted dirty trick – when he has specificially declined to say what he knew and when he knew it – takes a naivete worthy of a Miracle on 34th Street.
In a mere mortal it smacks of duplicitousness, unless you were someone capable of being in good faith as you attended 120 concerts - for an unapologetically Democratic rock star - attempting to curry favor in a long-distance bro-mance with someone who really couldn't be farther away from your camp politically if he were born in Moscow. And this could only eventually lead to a more conflicted self image, more over-indulging problems and a Heartbreak Hotel Prilosec OTC moment: Jimmy Fallon-The Boss and a "Born To Run" parody.
[YouTube video here]
If Chris Christie takes a play out of the Silver Linings Playbook – he doesn’t have to follow the template for Richard Milhouse Nixon being an intemperate, mean-spirited pit bull who would never, ever run out of ink or paper for his "enemies lists.”
But there it was – like a bridge too close - political cartoonists, like the ones proudly featured here at Cagle Cartoons, had a field day portraying Chris Christie as the bloated, big cheek Nixon face of his "I am not a crook" persona - substituting the word "bully" for "crook."
Maureen Dowd considers it a given that Chris Christie "can be a bully."
But bully for you can be chilly for me - and I'm insulated against the Arctic Vortex of national politricks by living in the Tropics - so if and when Chris Christie gets a "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" from American voters in 2016 isn't really my concern - Virgin Islanders cannot vote in Presidential elections (I believe it is called "taxation without representation?" Maybe the Tea Party can help me with that?)
What IS the Dude's concern is that - as with Nixon in his red-baiting campaigns for Congress, California Governor and Senator - the red flags on what is called "the character issue" were consistently there early on - as voters we just chose to ignore them because we liked that hellfire glint in Tricky Dick's eyes. Just as the warning signs - the red flags warning of a traffic jam on the George Washington ("I cannot tell a lie") Bridge are there for Chris Christie - well before Bridgegate - the writing was already on the wall - and we all know he's a Bruce Springsteen fan - and not a Pink Floyd fan. We've crossed that bridge before.
So just who is this white collar guy Chris Christie anyway?
The book on Chris Christie is that he's a hard-working "guy's guy" who gets the job done.
Sometimes - as in the case with Bridgegate - even getting a job done when it didn't need to be done in the first place. That's why he's a white collar guy, rather than a blue collar guy. White collar guys are attorneys who debate the meaning of the word "is." Blue collar guys "do stuff," like laying another brick in the wall. White collar guys like specious studies on "traffic flow of the George Washington Bridge during rush hour on the anniversary of 9-1-1." Blue collar guys just want to get home across the bridge after a long day of bricklaying.
Or:
Other stuff to "fuhgettaboutit" include:
[list the crap here]
Some friends of mine here - we'll call them the "Liberal attorneys on St. Croix," used to sport bumper stickers on their hybrid Prius vehicles that said: "No one died when Clinton lied."
If Chris Christie is caught parsing the far side of the truth (as one national reporter put it: "if he only heard about the scandal 24 hours ago, then how come he's already had two sleepless nights?") what will HIS bumper sticker say?
"Only ONE person died when Christie lied. (And even that hasn't been fully proven yet?)"
If Chris Christie does succeed - and wrests the 2016 Republican nomination from a contentious G.O.P. field set to include: Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump. Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, John Kasich, Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney.
Then that would mean Conservative voters want to get deep down and jiggy with their bad boy Nixon selves. And if they do, it will mean Chris Christie was scary, but only Nixon scary, NOT Barry Goldwater finger-on-the-trigger scary.
And if Martin Bashir again has a basic cable TV show then, he will probably say that Chris Christie, being a rather large man mesomorphically-speaking: "Houdini-like, made the smoking cone disappear somewhere on the Dark Side of the Moon."
And then of course, Martin Bashir will be fired again.
That dirty Limey bastard - how dare he! Da " noive" uh dat goi!
Because we all know Chris is a Springsteen fan - not a Pink Floyd fan.
And maybe I'll have to hit the bricks, then, too!
All in all, though, just another brick in the wall.
Copyright 2014 Secret Goldfish Publishing House/John Francis McCarthy
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