So with all the “will he or won’t he” speculation about Marco Rubio being the Marquis de Mittens Liason To The 99% or something this week, I wondered what our old friend Chris Christie is doing in the meantime when all the attention is on Marco here. Don’t feel too bad for Christie though. Turns out he’s heading to Jerusalem for Holy Week on somebody else’s dime.
In a trip billed as a “Jersey to Jerusalem Trade Mission”, Gov. Chris Christie will travel to Israel during Holy Week to expand business opportunities, experience the culture and meet with world leaders. He will also spend time in Jordan with King Abdullah II.
A delegation of business and religious leaders will join Christie, his family and staff, the administration announced this afternoon. The Republican governor will be in Israel from Sunday through Thursday and Jordan until Easter Sunday.
“I think it’s important for me to continue to get a greater awareness of the world around me as a leader and someone who now has a bit of a national voice,” Christie said in an interview in Washington in late February. “I think it’s important for me to continue to open up my mind and my experience to things that are outside of the state of New Jersey.”
Good general advice for anyone, I would think. Worked for Dubya, after all. Heck, the same group that inflicted him and Mittens on Israel is picking up the tab for Christie here, the Republican Jewish Coalition. He may not be the flavor of the month, but he’s still on the fast track to be the face of compassionate austerity for the party. Who knows.
So no, the GOP hasn’t kicked Chris off a cliff or anything. They’re still investing plenty in him so he’ll plague us later. Oy vey.
chopper
can’t wait for the inevitable footage of christie yelling at king abdullah. the goopers will swoon over that one.
jeffreyw
Let he who has never hung curtains in the nude laugh. The rest of us wince at the very thought.
Steve
They can keep him. Maybe give him to Gaza as humanitarian aid. Seriously, I hope he stays a while.
Hawes
Here’s his press conference.
Gin & Tonic
@jeffreyw: I had a friend who was doing an ER rotation at St. Vincent’s hospital in NYC’s West Village in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. Some of you may recognize the time/place. He said the hardest things to remove were light bulbs.
WyldPirate
I think Chris Christie is currently incapable of running for national office and surviving given his likely poor physical condition. The dude obviously has a short emotional fuse given his public bullying of others. The physical and mental stress would get him.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see him not seek a second term as NJ governor, pull a Huckabee and get a gastric bypass, and run in 2016.
nevsky42
Dunno, I always felt Giuliani would crash-and-burn as a national candidate because being an asshole might get you elected in NYC but doesn’t play well when you have to chat one-on-one in Iowa. I don’t see Christie doing well when it comes time to press the flesh.
And I want internet points for avoiding the obvious jokes…
priscianusjr
@Gin & Tonic:
dr. bloor
@priscianusjr:
In Christie’s case, the correct answer at St. Vincent’s was “That’s what PGY 1’s are for.”
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@priscianusjr:
None. The Free Market will fix it!
Bob2
Given that I live in NJ, most people here that I’ve met seem to despise him.
He’s also such a transparent phony in the way George W. Bush was with his ranching photo ops, but the media laps it up like a dog.
Chris
Oh yeah… that guy is DEFINITELY running for president.
beltane
@Steve: How will he help the people of Gaza? I’m pretty certain that Chris Christie is not halal.
catclub
An extremely likely candidate for King David syndrome!
One of my favorite diagnoses, along with ‘Von Munchausen syndrome by proxy’
Culture of Truth
Chris Christie is smarter than Mittens or Stupid. As evidence, he is sitting out 2012 out and is putting all his energy into 2016.
Breezeblock
Even if Mittens wins this year, Governor Large Marge is still plenty young to run in 2016 or 2020 — though apart from losing weight or serving in the Mittens Cabinet as Chief Donut Taster, I’m not clear what he will do to keep busy and stay in the public eye.
Alas, some of my friends like CC, though I can’t be sure they would vote for him for Prez. I’m not convinced he runs for re-election here in NJ in 2013.
biff diggerence
Ah, Rubio.
The Puerto Rican community in Florida must love him.
The GOP Lunatic Fringe has spent the last 60 years kissing the Miami Batistanistas asses.
Born American Citizens – not so much.
Cacti
In the category of things that shouldn’t matter but actually do, Christie’s girth is a real problem for any POTUS ambitions.
There’s nothing worse than being fat in the television age. Our last fat POTUS was 2 decades before the first boob tube.
catclub
@Breezeblock: “probably will not lose re-election in state-wide election by 18%” is not the greatest campaign slogan. But Santorum can’t use it.
Shrillhouse
Christie is good at yelling at people, and stuffing his face with food. I suppose one of those skills would be useful in Iowa…
dr. bloor
I’d say our best bet is that Mossad mistakes Christie for King Tut and takes him out during his visit.
Cacti
@Culture of Truth:
Ditto the Bush crime family.
They’ve dubbed Mittens to be the sacrificial lamb to pave the way for Jeb in 2016.
After 8 years in the wilderness, the desperation of R-voters will wash away the stink that Dubya left on the family brand.
Satanicpanic
@Cacti: Just for fun I think Democrats should find a guy with a beard, Republicans should run the fat guy and we’ll see which 19th century style candidate is less unacceptable to 21st century America.
Some Loser
@Cacti:
I believe you can be fat and still come of as “presidential”. Though, Christie does not look presidential, and no amount of weight-loss would change that.
Some Loser
I would certainly vote for a Santa Claus looking mutha fucka.
Gin & Tonic
@Satanicpanic:
Corzine’s available, isn’t he? I don’t think he’s employed right now…
Phil Perspective
@Culture of Truth: He has to get re-elected as Governor of NJ, first. Or are you saying he’s going to pull a Mittens?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The irony is, weigh issues aside, this is Christi’s year. The mindless conservative rage will be dying down by 2016. Christi may suck in a national general election but he has all the anger and assholeness of Newt and Santorum with no baggage, more brains than Mittens.
chopper
@Shrillhouse:
face it, he’s loud, argumentative and refuses to admit being wrong. he’s going to blend right in with the israelis.
Epicurus
Hey, look at the bright side; at least the big goof will be OUT of NJ for a little while.
bootsy
Maybe the chunky Koch boy toy is trying to clean up the rep. of his employers. Perhaps the stories of how the Koch’s deal with Iran (illegally), and how their dad was actually an honest-to-goodness N*zi (not the kind who is just an American Jew who doesn’t kotow to AIPAC), are starting to get around?
Or maybe it’s penance with Christian Zionists for that split second when it seemed like he wasn’t against Gay marriage.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
I hope they offer him after dinner mints. Just one, ‘a tiny little thin one’.
Villago Delenda Est
@Gin & Tonic:
Corzine should be doing 25 to life for grand theft.
Dan
Romney’s going to pick a veep candidate that fires up the base. Christie ain’t that guy. A hispanic former Mormon aint that guy either. I think we’ll see Frothy or Huck, or somebody with similar cred with the crazies.
Culture of Truth
@Cacti: or maybe Jeb was the “smart” one all along. In any case, Stupid did not help the crime family ‘brand’
Culture of Truth
@Phil Perspective: He’ll probably be reelected. But who knows?
Culture of Truth
@Satanicpanic: Ron Paul will grow muttonchops
Svensker
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
The Free Market done fixed it already. St. Vincent’s closed last year (or maybe the year before, one loses track). It was supposed to be converted to condos but the economy intervened so the building’s just sitting there empty. All the little businesses in the neighborhood that had grown up around it — card store, couple local fast food restaurants, tschotchke shops — all closed, too, because their business dried up. Their shops sat empty for a while but now Duane Reade (huge drug store chain) has bought them all up and is going to open a mega-store there. Makes the neighborhood so pleasant! And all the poor sick people have to go way uptown if they have the nerve to get ill.
Violet
When Santorum eventually doesn’t become the nominee this time, it’ll be His Turn in 2016.
Southern Beale
Wait, are you sure he’s not on the Elvis Presley Holy Land Tour? Seems more fitting.
Satanicpanic
@Culture of Truth: haha, I forgot that we do already have a 19th century candidate.
Violet
@Dan:
Huckabee’s gt a radio show starting up that’s in Limbaugh’s timeslot, just as Limbaugh is becoming an expensive anchor for stations. I don’t see him wanting to quit that just to join Etch-a-Sketch Mormon’s vanity presidential run. Frothy might do it, but he’s not really fundie bait either. He’s just less bad than Mittens.
Loneoak
Theres that old Yiddish saying that goes something like “If you want to do international trade meetings with Israel, the High Holy Week is a fucking retarded time to try.”
jibeaux
@Cacti: There were a couple of great SNL skits about Christie with their overweight guy. He would sort of gesture to his torso and say “This…can’t go national. I mean, can you picture me in Mississippi? In AUGUST?”
Haiwei
Hope they have lots of cheeseburgers over there. Otherwise, Chris might get grumpy.
Chris
@bootsy:
Dealing with Iran, eh? I must’ve missed that story. But I know their dad dealt with the Soviet Union (under Stalin, no less), so like father, like sons. Funny how the most devout anti-communist/islamist True Blooded Conservatives suddenly are happy to deal with them when there’s money involved.
Egg Berry
OT: Here’s something related to the Sgt Bales story: Sympathy for an accused murderer: What war will do to you. I’d be interested in hearing what some of our vets think.
rlrr
@Cacti:
There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.
— Stephen Colbert
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Loneoak: Yah, but the high holy week is in the fall there. This is is the Christian high holy week. Pesach is not as big a deal, in terms of holy days, as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This high holy week is late September to early October.
That said, the advice is quite good. I hda to nitpick over the specific week, because that’s what I do.
Chris
@Egg Berry:
I’m not a vet, but,
Because the man who gunned them down looks like you and wears a uniform your entire society tells you to worship and adulate like no other job on Earth, whereas his victims don’t look, sound or worship like you, and they belong to a world that your society either ignores or tells you to despise as Lousy Stinking Hajjis. It’s not rocket science.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
He could have his skin darkened and then wear a hoodie in Florida. That might be something new for him.
PeakVT
@Dan: Romney is going to make a poll-tested-yet-lousy decision, just like he does with everything else.
bootsy
@Chris: Oh, he dealt with the Nazis before he hung with Stalin.
Regarding Iran, here’s my favorite story of the year(s): Koch brothers getting richer with secret Iran sales.
Amir Khalid
@Chris:
For my part, I find Susan Reimer’s point of view depraved. Reimer freely admits to sympathizing with the admitted killer — the killer, mark you, not his victims. She goes on for paragraph after paragraph describing the circumstances that drove Bales to slaughter innocents in their sleep. She is surprised there are not 100 soldiers like him. She doubts he will be punished as a murderer of American civilians would — but does not find this deplorable “… because we know where the blame truly lies”, wherever that is.
__
Her tribute to the slaughtered and the bereaved:
I don’t think I’ve read anything quite this sickening before.
Loneoak
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Oh, I actually know that. I was in Israel for the High Holy week about a decade back. Spent my 21st Birthday at a family friend’s house on Yom Kippur. That was a hopping party, I tell you what.
Anyway, I just didn’t click through and realize that they meant the Xtian Holy Week. Makes more sense, I suppose.
kleinfeld
So Rubio is the 2012 game changer?! In other words, obvious pander to latinos.
Loneoak
@Amir Khalid:
I agree with her that it is surprising there aren’t more Bales (maybe we just never heard of them?). It’s largely a testament to the professionalism of our military.
Bales is a victim. One billionth the victim of the people he shot and their families, for sure. But still a victim of our abhorrent inability to account for the costs of war beforehand. The way she said it is rather tasteless, tho.
PeakVT
Fuel panic in the UK. Fights in the forecourts! (Whatever those are. Those English sure do speak a funny language.)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Loneoak: I fully give Christie credit for being too stupid to know when High Holy week in Jerusalem is. I don’t think much of him, clearly.
I bet that Yom Kippur was a memorable birthday.
Linda Featheringill
OT,
I watched a video embedded at DKos about Zimmerman when he was brought into the police station for questioning. He had NO blood or cuts or scrapes or bruises on him and nothing on his clothes. So much getting beaten by Trayvon.
But why are the police releasing all this stuff that incriminates Zimmerman? Even if they aren’t planning on taking him to trial?
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
I’m generally disgusted whenever the same people who gush and gush and gush about how brave and noble our troops are how hard it is to live like they do is, can’t bring themselves to give a shit about the civilians who live in these same war zones.
I could write a lot more about how much that pisses me off, but I’m just going to leave it at this for now: there is a time and a place to be sympathizing about how horrible life is for our soldiers, but an article about the brutal shooting of several Afghan civilians by one of them is not it, not when you’re using the murderer in question as the personification of “the troops” to be sympathized with.
Jay C
@Linda Featheringill:
That ABC News video of George Zimmerman being brought into the Sanford PD is all over the ‘Net – for a guy who was supposedly just in a “deadly force” fight and shooting, as per his own description, he looks in remarkable good shape. Funny, that….
But as to “…the police releasing all this stuff…“? I think part of it – if not most of it – is just plain old CYA: My own opinion, of course, but I think the Sanford PD got blindsided by the firestorm of outrage in the national media: it probably seemed to them, at the time, to be a fairly clear-cut ( and purely local) affair, and the nuclear-meltdown level of criticism (and the image of SPD as a gang of local-yokel racist assclowns – in a town that’s 30% black ) has got to sting.
The problem is that the dissemination of stuff like this video is probably going to harm any potential case against George Zimmerman, rather than help it.
PTirebiter
@Loneoak: even it was a great time, I mean seriously?
Howard Hughes: Well what in the hell does a Governor from New Jersey need to fly to Israel for?
Gov Christie: Uh, I was on a trade mission.
HH : Oh, buy a lot of fire insurance over there do they?
Loneoak
@Chris:
Seconded. That’s what I should have said @ 56.
gene108
@Breezeblock:
As a fellow NJ resident, I think Christie will run in 2013 and will be tough to beat.
He’s done things to hurt the poor, especially in places like Camden, by rescinding the millionaires tax that brought in $800 million per year and making up for the loss of revenue by slashing state services.
Those cuts in state services, though, have not really boomeranged on him because they aren’t effecting the middle and upper-middle class folks that much.
He’s not gone full-on social conservative nut-job, while showing some socially moderate street cred with some of justice appointments (i.e. not all white men).
Also, if Christie were to run for President, I don’t see him having made the same sort of statements Romney did with regards to abortion that could trip him up later on. Abortion just isn’t a big deal in NJ, one way or the other, so it doesn’t come up much, which is lucky for Christie.
PTirebiter
@Linda Featheringill: I don’t think they released it since it was exclusive to ABC. Maybe they bought it from someone who leaked it.
Amir Khalid
@Loneoak:
To understand is not to excuse. I understand that the stress of Robert Bales’ too many deployments, the trauma of his injuries, might well be what drove him to this crime. But the word “victim” becomes meaningless if we apply it to him; he wasn’t the one murdered in his bed by a foreigner gone amuk.
__
@PeakVT:
The “forecourt” of a “petrol” station is the open area at the front where customers can drive up to the “petrol” pumps to fill up. (“Petrol” is the name in English-speaking countries for the liquid fuel, refined from petroleum, used to power “motor cars”, or automobiles as you say in America.)
Dave
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
You’re adorable.
Ben Cisco
@Egg Berry:
I think she’s fucked in the head.
Mike in NC
The bagels in Jersey aren’t fresh enough for Chris Christie?
Chris
@Dave:
No, I don’t find that implausible. Remember, the face of the GOP throughout the 1990s was Newt Gingrich and his ranting and raving maniacs in Congress, and that kept backfiring on them… so by the time 2000 rolled around, they ran Bush as a “compassionate conservative,” who got the national media to portray him as a moderate. I could see them trying the same thing in 2016 or 2020.
Chris
@bootsy:
Thanks for the link, by the way. Hell of a family, eh?
catclub
@Linda Featheringill: I will only note that the ABC report I saw also says he was cleaned up by ems techs or someone at the scene. Given there was no video THERE, that is what a lawyer will bring up about this video.
Egg Berry
I should have mentioned that i don’t agree with the sentiments expressed in the column linked above, but wanted to get perspective from others.
Calouste
@PeakVT:
They have those every couple of years. The truckers’ union has found out that a really efficient way to protest is to create a blockade with their vehicles at the few refineries that exist in the UK. And whenever they threaten that, the British 27% goes into full panic mode and start spending an hour waiting in line to buy 2 gallons of fuel.
gene108
@Chris:
Compared to the current crop of Republicans, Bush, Jr. was a moderate.
He sort of “reversed” triangulated, with regards to some of his domestic policy. He did things Democrats had championed, but put a Republican spin on them, such as campaign finance reform, Rx coverage in Medicare and expanding the Dept. of Education.
I don’t see Republicans ever embracing that sort of compromise ever again.
They’ll move in lock step uniformity to drive us back to a pre-1932 government.
These are guys that turn routine votes, like raising the debt ceiling, into government (and financial markets/economic) paralyzing dramas. They don’t have it in them to do anything left but to push to undo the Great Society and New Deal programs we all take for granted.
Tony J
@catclub:
__
Given that he’s supposed to have had a busted nose (according to his lawyer) and a big old gash on the back of his head, they did a remarkable job. Best I’ve ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie. They cleaned him up so good that they made the wounds just… disappear.
Who needs Health Care Reform when you’ve got guys like that rocking their skillz on the street?
PeakVT
@Amir Khalid: See what I mean? And don’t even get me started on bonnets and boots.
Cassondra Minge
I like the concept of embedding communities with cameras, only wish there are more stories revolving around the ways of lives in these various communities. Is it possible to also hear some stories which might be strange to our ears but are a way of life with another community, stories that lie in the genre of a poor couple adopting a monkey for a son and planning its wedding. Or, a young man marrying a tree in an effort to beat destiny.
Jerrie Omo
I love this video…I would like to thank you for sharing such a trilling high-quality video…