Via Billmon, Digby‘s been mining the Halperin/Heilemann excerpts at Time:
… The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.)….
Digby adds “Sadly, waaaay too many liberal men have told me that they admire Christie for his “honesty.” Strangely, I haven’t met one woman of either party who can stand the guy….”
Just as well for our struggling nation that his Repub primary opponents will be all over Christie’s ethical shortcuts, because too many journamalists and the low-info voters they feed can’t tell a mensch from a momzer.
JPL
Most of this came out when he was running for Governor the first time and guess what, the voters didn’t care.
Corner Stone
Jeebus, are you just trying to send Cole into a death/shame spiral?
Hill Dweller
There is a picture floating around twitter of Christie screaming at a teacher while his wife stands beside him laughing.
I’ve seen Christie’s type before. He plays the tough guy, but if things ever actually went down, he would be the first one to either run or get the shit kicked out of him.
Also, too, his record as Governor is awful. But all the unwarranted praise from the Village has convinced people he is doing a decent job.
James E. Powell
@JPL:
But he was running against Corzine who was seriously damaged in a very bad year for the economy. And there was this guy in the White House that had a fair number of voters in a frenzy.
Alison
@Hill Dweller: Saw that picture too, from Weigel. Christie is like, the dictionary definition of an asshole. I mean, whoopie-do, he hugged Obama, I don’t give a fuck. The man is a sexist homophobic jackass. And I mean…I get that he’s not as super wingnutty as other GOPers and that’s why people think he can and will run for President and would be a difficult opponent…but come on. You can’t have his kind of attitude and behavior on a national campaign stumping tour. You can’t go to little towns and call people idiots and morons and tell them to shut up or piss off. You can’t get up in people’s faces when they challenge you. Forget his weight, his biggest problem is that mountainous ego he carries around.
Not that I care. Go ahead and make yourself unelectable, please. But sheesh, what a dick.
Omnes Omnibus
Christie is an asshole and a bully. Moreover, he is a specific type of asshole and bully that has some appeal in NY, NJ, and PA but rapidly diminishes as one gets further away. He will lose his temper at some 14 y/o girl at a Culver’s in Wisconsin; he’ll berate her and she’ll cry. It will be filmed and that will finish him in the upper Midwest. Yeah, we have assholes too, but that kind does not play well here.
Hunter Gathers
There aren’t enough white voters to make Christie POTUS. So look for a replay of Election Night last year, as all the pundits and Karl Rove will freak out when all those lazy Hispanics, stupid African Americans, and slutty women band together to tell Christie to go into the kitchen to make his own damn sandwich.
Hill Dweller
@Alison: He’s done quite a bit of shady stuff since becoming governor, in addition to having a mediocre record. It’s been swept under the rug by the Village, but it will come out in a presidential campaign.
Yatsuno
@JPL: Apparently they aren’t going to care the second time around either. I wonder what other corrupt shit he’s doing right now that hasn’t hit the surface.
Ripley
This would not be an effective strategy for Christie.
Cassidy
Someone talked about Christie on the front page! AL just gave Cole wood.
Alison
@Hill Dweller: I’m sure he thinks he’ll be smarter than Romney and not have any 47% moments, but dude…you know there is like a wake of angry past associates of his who will be thrilled to drop a line to David Corn. Mwahaha.
fuckwit
douchebag. do not want.
Chris
You know, if “honesty” is such a feature, I’d like to nominate every brain-dead foaming-at-the-mouth teabagger out there. Yes, they’re racist, homophobic, sexist and class-obsessed nutjobs, who believe most nonwhites shouldn’t be allowed to vote, gay people should be “cured” of their “sickness,” women can’t be trusted to control their own bodies or work for a living or exist as entities separate from their husbands, and the poorest 47% of the country should either starve to death or die from untreated illnesses. But they’re very honest in their belief that those are the Right Things To Do. Where’s their cookie?
Christ, what is it with so many liberals that makes them desperately look for “good Republican” figures they can “admire?”
I have – the only Christie groupie I know is a woman, in fact. (An East Coast trust fund baby whose father according to her used to do a job similar to Mitt Romney’s at Bain Capital. What’re the odds, eh?)
fuckwit
also via digby, the la airport shooter was a teabagger. imagine that! http://splcenter.org/blog/2013/11/02/hatewatch-exclusive-alleged-lax-shooter-referenced-patriot-conspiracy-theories/
Jeremy
@Omnes Omnibus: Christie will not be able to win New Jersey in a general election. New York is another blue state that always goes big for the democrats in presidential elections(25-30 points) and a republican hasn’t won Pennsylvania since 1988.
Christie’s appeal is very limited in a general election. The guy might be able to win a second term due to Hurricane Sandy but he has too many skeletons in his closet that will be used by republicans and Hillary Clinton if she is the nominee. Also the guy is one hamburger away from a heart attack.
Chris
@Hill Dweller:
East Coast Republican politician, probably the most prominent one at the moment. He’s their type.
Anya
I hate Christie with the heat of a thousand suns. He’s a sexist, homophopic bully. He’s bad in every conceivable issue important to decent people (except maybe hating Muslims) yet people like Jon Steward act like fan boys around him. Fuck that douchebag.
amk
Why only liberal men? Most white boys orgasm on such ‘honesty’ bluster. Fortunately their electoral influence is diminishing year by year.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris:
They are like Diogenes looking for his honest man. I say that if a good Republican resurfaces, s/he can come looking for me.
José Arcadío Buendía
*mamzer
Cacti
@JPL:
New Jersey state election =/= national election
mdblanche
Well, Christie tried berating the flight attendants into not charging him for a second seat, but they just kept quoting airline policy.
Corner Stone
@amk: It’s pretty easy for you to sit so casually in Brazil and criticize the electorate here in the states.
Narcissus
Republican Asshole Blowhard is also a Corrupt Asshole Blowhard
Whodathunk
Jeremy
@Hill Dweller: Christie has many flaws and his enemies in the republican primary and the democratic nominee will expose his record. Christie is a hot head who can’t handle pressure or confrontation.
Linda
@Chris: Liberals of a certain kind love Christie: the ones who thought “Waiting for Superman” was a brilliant vision brought to life, instead of a propaganda flick. They are tickled that he puts uppity public workers in their place, because he shares their contempt for wage slaves.
The villagers and their media followers have a crush on him because–not in spite of–his bullying. Nobody admires a bully quite as much as a coward. Also, he gets the cookie overt right-wing loons don’t get because he picks on the overt right-wing loons, salvaging the village fantasy of “centrism.” And he gets bravery points because he believes in cutting public spending, which is a way for him to tell the unwashed masses who depend on public money — or at least want it spent on the public– to go screw themselves.
Yatsuno
@Jeremy:
His asthma might take him out first. He was hospitalised a couple weeks ago for it, plus there is absolutely no way he can do the helicopter trick in a national campaign. Christie can’t run for President because he might not survive.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m curious what you mean by this.
Is it just a tribal thing because he’s not from the Midwest – as in, the image of an obnoxious East Coaster (or other outsider) yelling at a local girl would piss off people in a way that it wouldn’t if it was just between two Midwesterners? Or are there actually specific ways that you can or can’t be an asshole in different parts of the country? I’d never thought of regional differences in those terms before (not in presidential campaigning).
mai naem
I admit I am a little worried about Christie. I had figured the weight thing was going to be the huge negative but with the lap band surgery he’ll be a regular size by the end of next year. I personally think he’s a big bully and I think/hope he’ll lose it in a town hall setting and his candidacy will flame out.
I remember hearing that he used expensive transportation when going from the hotel to the airport at different places. He spent around $400 dollars instead of $200 for a trip. Also I may be completely wrong about this, but didn’t he have a partisan prosecution when he was the US Attorney. .
Mike with a Mic
@amk:
I don’t think it’s white guys so much as it’s a regional thing. There’s a reason Jersey, NY, Boston, Philly, hell the North Eastern Seaboard is known for that tough guy shtick. It sells well there, it doesn’t sell well outside of there. Just as Southern behaviors sell well there, but not so much outside of it. The hype is that he’s a North East Coast Republican that can win on the North East Coast in a blue state. But all those states are blue! The man is a walking Jersey stereotype, and a walking east-coast-tough-talking-asshole stereotype as well. That shit sells well in that region, but it doesn’t sell well outside of it.
The right will always vote for the Republican, but East Coast Asshole isn’t what you want to sell to the Midwest Nice, Southern Polite Gentry, or West Coast Chill.
Idiocyncratic regional identity surely helps in that region, in other parts of the country you just seem like a stereotype plucked off reality TV, in this case Jersey Shore.
Cacti
@Yatsuno:
That’s been my biggest doubt about him.
Christie does not look like a healthy guy. I just don’t see him being up for a year of running on no sleep, jetting and busing from state to state, city to city, sleeping in hotels, eating bad food, and drinking coffee by the quart.
Not to mention, it’s hard to see him gaining traction on Hillary being too old for POTUS, when he looks like he’s about a sandwich short of 400 lbs and a coronary bypass.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I tend to agree Christie can’t hide his inner asshole long enough for a Presidential campaign, especially against Hillary, when and if. All his public outbursts that I’ve seen have been directed at women. That said, I am surprised he hasn’t given the game away already, he’s a good retail politician, if you saw his Letterman appearance, and he’ll do a lot of those; and he’d have to do whatever the modern equivalent of a dead girl or a live boy to lose the Village. Tweety did say one interesting thing (no, really), Cruz and Christie would probably be the confrontation I thought we were gonna see between McCain and Giuliani five years ago.
also, too, “family foundation”? I thought Christie was raised by an impoverished single mother. Smells like another self-mythologizing Paul Ryan
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: You don’t scream at people here. People are less brash and sometimes less direct. Lower key. Scott Walker is as big an asshole as Christie, but you would never see him publicly berate someone. Does this help?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
as when the press fell all over themselves to get a mocking nickname from Dumbya
Felonius Monk
Pufferbelly is a conniving, dishonest asshole? —- Oh, that’s right, he’s a Republican.
Mike with a Mic
@Chris:
Yeah it’s regional. Southern people will say “bless your heart” and other such sugar laced comments that are actually backhanded insults. That doesn’t fly in the North East because it’s viewed as simple minded and slandering people instead of having the balls to come out and say it. Cursing people out and yelling at people is associated with the North East and is considered OK there, but it’s not fit for polite people or considered proper in the South.
Assholes are still assholes, but what’s considered the acceptable way to be an asshole varies wildly by region. You don’t call someone a cock sucker and yell at them in the South, and you don’t say “bless your heart” in the North East.
Stewish Steel
So his opponent, Buono, hasn’t a prayer, right? This is what I’m picking up.
@Yatsuno:
What is “the hellicopter trick?”
Wait! If it’s a sex thing I don’t want to know!
Jeremy
@Yatsuno: Thanks for that info I didn’t hear about that. The guy is unhealthy and I can’t see him dealing with a year of campaigning all over the country. A former Presidential doctor even said that he wouldn’t be able to survive.
Corner Stone
@Stewish Steel: You’ve always seemed a little “stewish” to me. If you know what I mean.
Hal
I’m almost annoyed at the sudden realization that Christie is an asshole. Ever since he was elected I’ve seen plenty of Liberals who decided Christie was exactly who Obama should model himself after. Gosh, if only Obama wasn’t such a wimp. He should be just like that Christie fellow. So forceful! Never mind his awful policies or awful personality. So what if the man has to take a helicopter to his kids little league game and then a fucking limo because he can’t walk a few hundred feet. So, so forceful!
Though I do have to say Mitt Romney’s fat shaming exposed in the book is also quite disgusting. Romney is such an entitled frat boy prick he would have swooned over Christie if Christie was a P90X sycophant like Eddie Munster.
Also, lol at Kristol’s Obamacare worse than Watergate, per Newsmax. How many worse than Watergate’s have we had so far? Though I should point out On The Media has Glenn Kessler on this week to give Obama four Pinocchios on the you can keep your old insurance claim. No mention of the grandfather clause or the insurance companies making some of these decisions in order to make more money. Even the Liberal NPR…
Stewish Steel
@Chris: @Omnes Omnibus: Midwest sun-chapped daddies are always measured and under control. Yelling would be considered a display of weakness.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike with a Mic: And within the culture, the remark is understood. If someone in my family says “I am not sure that is a good idea” people from outside the upper Midwest should hear “OMFG, if you do that YOU WILL FUCKING DIE!!!!” And so on.
MikeJ
@Mike with a Mic:
The idea is that if he could swing the northeast, the confederacy will do as they’re told, like they always do, and vote for the Republican. It’s the same idea as running Bill Clinton. The difference is, Christie won’t actually win any extra states, including New Jersey, in a presidential election.
Suffern ACE
@Jeremy: Christie is as compromised as his likely opponent is. It’s the age we live in.
The word cloud around Hillary does not exactly have “honest” in 48 point font.
Chris
@Linda:
The centrism thing is definitely key to the Village’s crush on him.
I think they have a Platonic ideal type for what’s Presidential Material, which they would call “moderate Republicans,” which actually means “people I trust to understand that my tax cuts are more important than their voters’ Culture War shiny toys,” and which generally translates to “East Coast elites.” (Sorry to be beating the East Coast thing in this thread, especially as I’m from Maryland/DC, but I think it’s a huge part of Christie’s appeal to the Village – he’s One Of Them in a way that a born and raised red state populist can never be. The Village has its cultural prejudices too).
Romney fit the bill. McCain, scion of an Annapolis dynasty and thirty year Washington insider, fit the bill. George W. Bush, Yalie and heir to the Bush dynasty, fit the bill (though he also spoke fluent Heartlandese, which made him the best of both worlds politically). Christie, I think, is the person they’re all looking at right now to continue that tradition.
Stewish Steel
@Corner Stone: Careful, I’m a member of B’nai B’roth!
Mike with a Mic
@Hal:
That’s North East Coast Liberals. Since that’s where the media, many liberal power centers, and a lot of liberal money required to win is, there is a cultural bias at play. That since your the boss if you just go in there, scream at people, insult them, prove your superiority in education/acomplishment/wealth they will all fall in line. Because that flies on the East Coast and it’s how we do what we do.
But that doesn’t fly once you get out of the region. Instead you just look like an out of control ego maniac with an attitude problem. Yelling and screaming at people works in Jersey, not so much in Seattle.
Shocker… liberal media out of NYC wants people to act like New Yorkers and people from Jersey, thinks that’s the solution to fixing problems.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I don’t know. Remember Christie’s convention speech where he barely mentioned Romney (maybe not at all?)? The only person who wants Chris Christie in a number two spot less than Chris Christie is whoever’s in the number one spot, especially a colorless stiff like Romney.
Also, because I really, really hate Mitt Romney:
hitchhiker
He’s entertaining. It’s fun to watch him say things we left-coasties would not say, in tones we would not use.
This does not make him seem electable.
pseudonymous in nc
Chris Christie, New Jersey politician.
And yeah, somehow I don’t think he’s built for the mom’s diner and grocery store politics of the early primaries, where you’re expected to treat the good people of Bumfuck County, Iowa like they’re the heart and soul of America.
Jeremy
And the idea that Christie can pick off blue states in the North east is laughable. Romney was a former governor of deep blue Mass. and Obama destroyed him by a 25 % point margin. Christie won’t put NJ or any other state in the region in play.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
It does, thank you!
@Mike with a Mic:
@Stewish Steel:
And thank you as well.
Corner Stone
@Stewish Steel: Sounds tasty. Do you use Red Sea salt for flavoring?
Cacti
@MikeJ:
The Republicans won’t win another presidential election if they keep losing women voters by a 10-point margin. I don’t see Christie as the guy that’s going to help with that problem.
amk
@Jeremy: Exactly. He is another giuliani who won’t even clear the first few rounds of the batshit crazy primary.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sigh. The fabled restrained milieu.
Narcissus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Romney was an even more disgusting person underneath the mask than we thought
Omnes Omnibus
@Jeremy: What state anywhere does he put in play?
Jeremy
@Suffern ACE: I know that. I’m just saying that Christie is going to have a real hard time winning the nomination and will be at a disadvantage in the general. The Electoral College already favors the democratic nominee and it will only increase over a couple of election cycles.
Anoniminous
@Yatsuno:
Nah. The guy is one dinner mint away from a heart attack.
Running for the presidency is a grueling two-to-three year marathon that starts off slow and then gets more physically draining. That’s the reason we don’t have people like William “The Blimp” Taft running for president. There’s no way Christie would survive.
Mike with a Mic
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep, hence Midwest Nice, which is always considered a selling point of Midwest. It’s also why Paul Ryan kept getting lauded for being so well spoken, humble, earnest, and all sorts of other things that people love about the Midwest.
My family is from NYC originally (for the states). So the entire yelling, cursing, and threatening people seems pretty damn normal to me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narcissus: I am pretty sure that the same is true of Christie.
Cacti
@Narcissus:
Grown up Romney never changed much from the teenage miscreant who led a gang assault of a homosexual classmate.
Stewish Steel
@Corner Stone: So long as it’s kosher!
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: New Hampshire and maybe Ontario.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike with a Mic:
It’s also why I can read him and see the actual asshole.
Chris
@Narcissus:
I had Mitt Romney pegged as an irredeemable asshole (even before you get at his politics) all the way back in the 2008 primaries, when he was at a townhall meeting, a disabled guy asked him why he’d voted against medical marijuana, and Romney just stood nodding for maybe twenty seconds and then was basically like “excuse me, my script didn’t prepare anything for this, I have to go… over there.”
MikeJ
@Anoniminous:
Or if we’re lucky, something more dramatic.
It’s wafer thin.
danielx
…Nor yet from a goniff. I am shocked, shocked to hear of such misdeeds on the part of a Republican holding high office, and one who holds national aspirations no less.
On the other hand, others have attained the Oval Office while laboring under greater handicaps, such as Bush the Lesser’s dislike of and distaste for intellectual exercise. Christie could use a personality transplant and is generally an all around douche rocket in his public persona. But his misdeeds (known misdeeds, that is) tend towards pecuniary issues, more or less garden variety semi-corruption of the sort that I admit I sort of expect from New Jersey pols.
Sidebar: yes, categorization of the worst part, it’s true, and I’m certain there are many dedicated and honest elected officials from the state. It’s just that you don’t hear about them, much.
I certainly wouldn’t want to see Christie anywhere close to the White House – he’s borderline personality disordered, for chrissakes. I mean, didn’t we just a while ago have this kind of incurious guy in there who had major daddy issues to boot? But that’s the whole of Christie’s schtick for the rubes who think he’s “honest” (hint: he ain’t) – by comparison with the other Repubs getting fired up for 2016, he looks and sounds semi-reasonable. For a Republican, that is…good god, Christie sounds like Daniel fucking Webster in comparison with Ted Cruz. That’s the remarkable thing, people thinking Christie is “honest” when he’s being generally an all-around asshole, AND thinking, ‘well hell, I can put up with a little corruption (political corruption being so uncommon and all)…Christie isn’t going to shut down the EPA, though he might drop the 82nd Airborne on Seattle if they pissed him off”.
And so on. If by some miracle Christie was nominated and elected he would almost certainly have sold himself to a triumvirate version of Satan appearing in the guises of Ayn Rand, one of the Koch brothers, and Robert E. Lee. I don’t like what his policies were or are now for the most part, I don’t want to know what they would be with him as President – period.
Kudos to Digby for suffering through anything by Mark Halperin.
Omnes Omnibus
@MikeJ: Fucking inevitable.
Jeremy
@Omnes Omnibus: That is a good question. The village idiots believe that Christie can win some blue states but they have no evidence to back that up.
But they were the same morons who believed that Romney was going to win Virginia and had a shot in blue states like Oregon and Minnesota which Obama won by double digits.
Chris
@Hal:
I’m fairly sure Obama would lose, like, ten percent of his white voters overnight if he acted like half as much of an asshole as Christie does. Because in context, it doesn’t look “forceful,” it looks “OMG Angry Black Guy!”
Cacti
@Chris:
Having been raised Mormon, I knew Romney’s type instantly. Perfect hair, perfect (looking) family, important job, important church callings, all smiles and plastic nice on the surface, but occasionally apt to let slip that there was something very ugly lurking underneath.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Kinda funny, though, to see Halperin and his sidekick being used, again, to pump revenge gossip into the Village tea dances. I don’t think they’ll make as much money off this one though. I don’t see a movie coming out of 2012. But if they do I’ll start a kickstart or whatever to get Kate McKinnon hired to play The Lady Ann
Anoniminous
PPP of Americans has:
But within the GOP Ted Cruz comes out on top:
Christie is the darling of the Mediums, like Huntsman a’fore him. Like Huntsman afore him Christie is going nowhere. (Except maybe to Baltimore for some crab cakes.)
Suffern ACE
When is daylight savings anyway? Does the clock strike 2:00am and fall back to 1 am? Or is it 3:00am falls back to 2:00am?
Anya
@Corner Stone: India, not Brazil.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jeremy: Obama functions a lot like an upper Midwesterner (Chicago is the capital after all). You don’t see him flip out. When he loses his temper, he gets quieter. Biden is a non-WASP Northeasterner. He isn’t an asshole, but he can communicate with some people that Obama doesn’t reach. It’s cultural and stylistic.
Anoniminous
@MikeJ:
I was thinking about that scene as I typed.
Kay
@Linda:
That’s a lovely photo of national ed “reform” celebrity Chris Christie with the teacher, though, screaming at her with his finger in her face. The hostility towards public school teachers is just goddamned weird. It goes beyond contempt for middle class people and unions, although I definitely think it’s connected to the fact that most of them who bear the brunt of this rage are women.
I still can’t figure out why public school teachers were singled out as America’s Punching Bags by everyone from this corrupt, lying asshole to the editorial page of the NYTimes, but they should all consult a therapist. I didn’t even like school or have any particular affinity for teachers but the level of vitriol directed at them is just nuts. That a governor thinks this is acceptable behavior and no one will even bat an eyelash to me just shows how far it’s gone.
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/11/exclusive-govchristie-to-teacher-i-am.html
Jeremy
@Chris: That’s why they called Romney a robot. People talked about Gore, Kerry, and Dukakis lacking a personality but Romney was in a whole other league. The guy is creepy !
MikeJ
@Anoniminous: I’m watching, “The Rutles: All You Need is Cash” so Python is foremost in my brain right now.
Amir Khalid
Chris Christie’s VP vetting codename: “Pufferfish”. I like that.
I guess so; but as Digby goes on to note, bullies are generally more disliked than admired for their bullying. It was part of what sank Pufferfish’s chances with Romney, after all, and it must place an upper bound on his acceptability outside New Jersey. Having said that, though, I suppose I’ll take him seriously as a presidential candidate in 2016 if Bruce Springsteen ever endorses him.
Jeremy
@Cacti: It’s weird since George Romney and his wife were good people. They were the old school Rockefeller Republican variety but the father was 1000 x better than the son.
Alison
@Kay:
Especially considering, while we all certainly had those ones we couldn’t stand or who were mean or whatever, pretty much everyone who went to public school also has at least a couple teachers they loved, who made a big difference in their lives, who they still reference as influential people. But then they move from specific to general and suddenly it’s blah blah evil unions blah blah charters blah blah i don’t wanna pay no taxes. Very annoying.
Mike with a Mic
@Omnes Omnibus:
Biden is from DE, there is no major city. He’s got the just blurting shit out, cursing, saying what you think part down pat. The raging asshole part is usually part of being urban. Also the fast talking, walking fast, and other parts of the NE shtick. There’s a reason why it’s the big cities that are most famous for jerkass behavior.
And why there’s no Irish like the Boston Irish. Also why Philly is known for hurling batteries at Santa.
I should also say that… Rhode Island isn’t completely jerkass either… but again, no real urban areas.
Anoniminous
@MikeJ:
I have always thought, in the back of mind, cheese and onions while eating a Yellow Submarine Sandwich.
Broadcast or is it available on DVD?
Stewish Steel
@Kay:
ding!
Chris
@Cacti:
Heh.
I’m not a Mormon. What I was raised on was episodes of classic Star Trek and Twilight Zone. And when I see people like Mittens showing off their image of a blissful, idyllic, conflict-free family and community, it always brings that inner child to the surface, screaming “Remember all these planets the Enterprise visited! If it looks too good to be true, IT’S HIDING A DARK DEEP HORRIFYING SECRET!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!”
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
Like you, I am a lawyer. I don’t really get too upset at the attacks on us (even though they are by people who don’t understand a damn thing), but people who attack teachers are simply scum. Okay, part of it is that my mom was a teacher and I saw how hard she worked and how much of herself she put into her career. But besides that, we are talking about people who earn a moderate wage, work long hours, and make a real difference.
Hunter Gathers
@Kay
Because most of them are women. Because taxes pay their salaries. Because everybody thinks that the public school system is shit, except for the public school their precious little snowflakes attend. Because the struggles of inner city schools are a constant feature on the front page of every big city paper. Mostly because they are women.
It’s going to be a Boys V. Girls election, with all of the class and decorum that is usually associated with middle school playgrounds.
Kay
@Alison:
Kasich had to apologize and grovel after describing a cop as an “idiot” (the cop gave him a ticket because Kasich passed an emergency vehicle) but Christie can publicly berate this woman and they’ll all be congratulating him on Morning Joe for putting her in her place. Christies wife is smiling in the photo! She’s thrilled he’s taking that teacher down a peg! Yeah!
It’s some kind of mass mental illness. Someone should do a study.
Alison
@Kay: It really is disgusting. And these assholes in government never work as hard and for so little as a teacher does.
MikeJ
@Anoniminous: DVD from the library. Also picked up Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close.
Suzanne
@Cacti:
That is absolutely 100% true. I spent my “formative years” in northwest Mesa, AZ, home of Russell Pearce and Jeff Flake, and I did in fact attend school with many of their relatives/kids. My non-LDS friends and I used to comment on how so many of them have this completely cheerful, accommodating demeanors and these plastic smiles, and yet, if you ask them a question about anything that makes them uncomfortable, they find some smarmy way to not answer. Yet they won’t show annoyance and they really want to avoid discord. Their culture deeply ingrains forced cheerfulness and an agreeable nature. As a result, even though many of them are very nice people, there is something not genuine in many of them that, like you said, is instantly recognizable in Romney. I was musing today on one of the moments in the debates when Obama really scored a point on him, and Romney just stood there smirking uncomfortably.
Ironically, I spent the first half of my childhood on Long Island, and definitely inherited the cultural tendency toward what may be considered an more aggressive/direct personality. It is definitely a regional outlier here, as other commenters have noted.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike with a Mic: Delaware is how far from Philly and NJ?
Mike with a Mic
@Alison:
Well, at least in DC… the education system was where you ginned up more and more bullshit jobs to hand out to campaign supporters and backers. This wasn’t the fault “the teachers”, but the mayors office certainly did turn the DC public school system into a massively corrupt jobs program, and it festered for decades. Add into that the fact that any attempts to fix it got assaulted as racism and trying to steal jobs from black people (which it should be noted, we now have an issue where having Asian nurses is “dirty Asians stealing jobs from black people” here in politics now, and also that Asians create whore houses, from Barry yet fucking AGAIN) and people started to assume the entire education system was rotten on all levels.
Again, none of this was “the teachers” it was all above their level, but they were the public face. And the mayors office shamefully trotted out the middle class teachers as “the victims” whenever people went after the mayors office or the cronies he’d riddled the upper echelons with. After a certain point, people just stopped giving a fuck that they were being used and figured they’d have to be a casualty to fix the rot at the top.
Public education was a part of the entire sad saga of mayor Barry, reforming the actual problem (not teachers) isn’t possible because of local politics and entrenched power. It’s one of the sadder parts of his legacy, and at this point I just think it’s a wound that will require his passing to fix.
It’s not fair to public servants, but once they get associated with corrupt leadership because of abuse and cronyism by the upper ranks, that trust is very hard to fix.
Alison
@Mike with a Mic: Well, it’s definitely a shame that they’re bearing the brunt of that shit, and yet another example of the public having the intellectual curiosity of a caterpillar and not bothering to actually delve into the details of situations like these. They just say “Tell us who to hate” and some asshole points to those way down the ladder and says “THOSE PEOPLE” and they go all in. Sad.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, because it’s not even in the same ballpark. This is like “lazy, slovely teachers– they are the problem”. I’m just amazed reading some of this stuff.
I mean, come on. This is the governor of a state. ALL of the public schools are “failure factories” and then: “what do you want?” That’s how he talks to her?
Remember when political leaders told us to respect teachers and work hard? When did it become okay to just unload on them?
Anoniminous
@MikeJ:
Thanks. I’ll look for it. I’d like to see it again to see if is as funny now as it was in 1978.
Mike with a Mic
@Alison:
I don’t blame the people or the parents honestly. Many of them were/are struggling and don’t have the time to look into it. Toss into that the mayors office lying it’s ass off and playing the racial issue from one side, and then the privatization fetish crowd lying their asses off and playing racial issues from another side what are people supposed to do? It’s a world of shit and teachers, parents, and students all suffer. DC also has some really bad racial history that helped charge the issue.
The teachers got sold the fuck out by assholes on both sides and they were the only faces the local population could really put on the entire sad story. Then Rhee rode in on her white horse and offered a fairy tale solution that people were all too desperate to accept. She would have been taking less seriously had (Barry AGAIN) not been well known for slandering Asians as racists, dirty, prostitution scheme running, evil people who were taking jobs from black people and ruining chocolate city. So any sort of rational warning about just what the fuck was wrong with Rhee got dismissed as Barry and his friends slandering Asians again because… well it’s Tuesday. So believing the negative things about Rhee was tantamount to buying into racist slander against the larger Asian community.
MikeJ
@Anoniminous: Fun to see Senator Al Franken as one of John Belushi’s henchmen. And of course the songs are all spot on.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: This is dead on. Especially since Culver’s is like a picnic basket to that fucking Yogi Bear.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Butter burgers and frozen custard… ::Homer sounds::
Jeremy
@Omnes Omnibus: Delaware borders NJ and the Delaware Memorial Bridge is a major bridge over the Delaware river which connects Delaware and New Jersey. Wilmington Delaware (the hometown of Joe Biden) is 36 minutes from Philadelphia.
Steeplejack
@Suffern ACE:
At 2:00 a.m. it goes back to 1:00 a.m.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jeremy: It was rhetorical.
Kay
@Alison:
He doesn’t like babysitters either. He said early ed was government-funded babysitting, therefore expressing his contempt for BOTH teachers and babysitters.
You know, those scumbag greedy babysitters that we all loathe and yet leave our children with every day. Them. The babysitters. America’s problem :)
Jeremy
@Omnes Omnibus: LOL ! sorry didn’t catch that.
Chris
@Mike with a Mic:
So basically, the conflict in DC public schools gave you a choice between the robber barons and Tammany Hall.
Yikes…
piratedan
@Suzanne: boy you nailed the Mormon facade quite well. The thing that’s strange is that there really are some very nice, normal Mormons who do work hard, raise good kids and do good works, the thing is, I’ve rarely, if ever seen them in charge in the church hierarchy. I get the distinct impression that the LDS is just as rigid as the politicians that are of the same faith, guys like Lee, Chaffee and Flake and Franks…. You do get the sense that there is indeed something lurid beneath the mask. Some of that slipped when Flake’s kid went off in social media and was quickly and quietly hushed up.
Alison
@Kay: Well, I’ve got a message for him
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5zfNhfOklQ
Anne Laurie
@Chris:
Oh, absolutely. Think Garrison Keillor — he’d never have been able to make Lake Woebegone a byword if he’d been on the radio outside the Midwest.
I grew up in the Bronx and then went to a Midwestern state university. Most of my freshman year, people kept saying inexplicable things like “Why are you always so angry?” and “You don’t need to hurry, we’ve got plenty of time” — I finally figured out I was just talking too loud, walking too fast, being too blunt for my new home.
To oversimplify, the ‘Northeast’, especially the Bos-Wash / Acela corridor, has always rewarded the “wheeler-dealers” — from the Dutch ‘buying Manhattan for a few strings of beads, from a tribe that didn’t even own the property’, to the ‘don’t take any wooden nutmeg’ Yankee (slave) traders, to the ‘Northern charm and Souther efficiency’ of DC. The exemplar was the immigrant, from overseas or the rural hinterlands, showing up one jump ahead of starvation and forcing themselves into success, with any amount of audience-friendly screaming & theatrics along the way.
The Midwest, on the other hand, never outgrew its German/Scandinavian rural myth — stoic farmers looking only for a patch of humble prosperity, relying on each other in the inevitable times of weather trouble & crop disasters, snowed into a one-room loghouse for six dark months of every year with all the extended family (and sometimes the livestock). Northeasterners like Christie would be suspected of ulterior motives at any time, but his “I am a blowhard bully and proud of it” routine is cherished by other Northeasterners — including the Media Villagers, especially the ones who came from outside the Northeast, who actually chose living in the bright-lights-big-city Ankh Morpork teeming urban hellholes of our common imagination.
Chris
@piratedan:
I think the people who are genuinely interested in doing good works, whether in their family or in the community, are often the same kind of people who don’t like all the bullshit, posturing, backstabbing crap that comes with climbing a hierarchy. So they stay down in the trenches as it were, working in soup kitchens, schools, or whatever place they think they’re needed, while the egomaniacs go after the positions of power.
(What you’re describing’s basically what I saw in the Catholic Student Association at my university).
piratedan
@Chris: I think that may be a coverall for most “people of faith”, they’re too busy trying to set the example and being the example to be busy pontificating and getting into telling other folks how to think, how to feel and who to worship. Hence just about any religious leader that seeks the visibility always has me wary about their intentions.
piratedan
this made me laugh…..
http://leftycartoons.com/the-24-types-of-libertarian/
Alison
@piratedan: LOL, though I’d say many of them are a few of those mashed into one.
Anne Laurie
@Kay: Back when Bill Clinton first started running for president, in the early 1990s, I started saying I’d never previously understood how many men had serious anger issues regarding Older Women With Authority. I mean, I’d always been a feminist, I knew about generalized male anger & patriarchalism, but the specific vitriol directed at Hillary (no matter what she did or didn’t do), by men who considered themselves liberals, Democrats, and feminists made it clear that a lot of XY carriers just never got over being weaned. Or maybe toilet trained.
Didn’t make me popular then, didn’t make me popular (even with other John Edwards supporters) in 2007, and I’m sure won’t make me popular in 2015, either. Such is life.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie:
I have to call bullshit. The Upper Midwest was settled first by Puritan New Englanders and then filled in by the Germans and Scandinavians. There isn’t a “stoic farmers looking only for a patch of humble prosperity, relying on each other in the inevitable times of weather trouble & crop disasters, snowed into a one-room loghouse for six dark months of every year with all the extended family (and sometimes the livestock)” myth. There is an idea that no one gets anything on his/her own. There is an idea as expressed by the native Midwesterner, Hillary Clinton, that it takes a village.
Mike with a Mic
@Anne Laurie:
I’d also add there is outright suspicion here on the NE when someone is being polite and nice to you. The first thoughts are to watch your wallet and wonder just what they are angling for. Being loud and a blowhard is, in a way, nice. You have no doubts where someone stands and you don’t feel they’re trying to sucker you in and then pull a fast one on you when your guard is down. Someone who’s smiling at you probably has a game, or you just might be the mark/sucker/idiot at the card table tonight.
Furthermore it’s often considered outright rude at times. I’ve got shit to do, places to go, people to see, so just come right the fuck out and say it, let’s cut a fucking deal. This mundane getting to know you shit and bullshit games where we pretend to care about each other is just wasting time for all involved. That you’re bothering with it means you not only don’t respect me, you don’t respect yourself. Plus the entire paranoia that someone who is being “silent” is actually just listening to everything that’s being said and silently plotting behind your backs, so watch that one they aren’t trust worthy. Where the screaming asshole, well, you know where he sits and isn’t a schemer.
That all said, the NE is a nice place. If you can get past the loud mouthed yelling and cursing, most people are fairly gregarious and friendly. Which is probably why to a lot of “us”, Christie yelling and screaming at people makes him “huggable” and “real”, a normal real person. Not some smiling polite fucker who’d sell his own mothers kidney’s with a smile and a nice comment. Oddly enough, in a lot of places here, cursing up a storm and hurling insults at close friends and relatives is a sign of affection.
Going back to what Anne said, because there are so many scam artists (hell we have Wall Street, Insurance, and the Congress here) the view that someone being overly friendly and soft spoken just might be a huckster isn’t misplaced. A lot of Southern humor is based off how easy to fool Northern types are with a smile and polite words spoken with a slow drawl. Where someone in Philly screaming “jooz mutha fuckas” at you, is probably just a friendly real man from the docks.
Chris
@Anne Laurie:
@Omnes Omnibus:
By the sound of it, it may not be incompatible – sounds like the “it takes a village” concept fits both myths. No reason the Anglo Puritans couldn’t have laid the cultural groundworks, and the Germans and Scandinavians who came later found it a good fit for their own mentality. (I’m just going off of what you both said, I’ve never been to the Midwest – it sounds like you’re agreeing on the basic culture, just not where it originated).
One thing, though. AL, what you’re describing – is it just me, or is that least a much of an “urban v. rural” thing as “Northeast v. Midwest?” Does the German/Scandinavian (or Puritan, whichever) mentality still hold when you’re in Chicago or Detroit, and does the wheeler-dealer mentality still hold when you’re in Pennsyltucky or upstate New York? (Mind you, it may not matter politically given how completely the cities dominate Northeastern politics…)
fuckwit
@Cacti: voter id, voter suppression, you just make it impossible for women to vote! problem solved.
Suzanne
@Mike with a Mic:
As much as it pains me to admit it, this is the one quality in Christie that I grudgingly appreciate. Mormons all feel like used-car salesmen in a way, certainly Historical Footnote. But I am keenly aware that that personality type is not appreciated by everyone. I can certainly see most of the God-botherers having an issue with it.
Amir Khalid
This story about Christie gives me a sense that someone in power thinks his Presidential candidacy needs to be torpedoed, before launch if possible, and the story is an early shot across his bow. Does anyone else here have this sense?
fuckwit
@Anne Laurie: but girls are weaned and potty trained too. why don’t they have the sa,e issues?
piratedan
@Amir Khalid: I would concur… as always when it comes to Republicans…. follow the money… the caveat… there’s so much of it on the R side to follow.
MikeJ
@Amir Khalid: Or it could just be inoculation. If there’s anything bad for people to say about you, get it out in public far in advance so that by the time we get to Iowa it’s already old history. If people have heard of nothing but the fat screaming bully and then they meet the slimmed down, smiling guy at the state fair they’ll ignore everything else they’ve heard about you.
fuckwit
@Hunter Gathers: combination of sexism and FREE DUMB! as in, i am free to be dumb! ain’nt mobody got no right to force larnin on me, i’m an american!
Stewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus: This is the second time I’ve written this tonight, and in a different context, but my friend from Duluth MN once told me that if he could go back in time and deliver one message to his younger self it would be, “You are not special.”
Just a gruffer version of It Takes A Village.
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid:
Quite perceptive. I can’t guess if it’s torpedoing or innoculation.
Y’all make Governor Christie sound like Ralph Cramden with a law degree.
Ralph Cramden wore on my nerves.
Amir Khalid
@Suzanne:
So he’s up front about being a playground bully. The up-frontness is kind of admirable, I suppose. The playground bully part? Imagine President Christie in a business meeting with some other country’s PM or president, or even just a meeting of his own Cabinet, and one can only dread the outcome.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Chicagoans are more polite than New Yorkers. It is regional. Boston and New York are dirtier than Chicago and Milwaukee. Personal observation. BTW the term polite may better be expressed as more ostensibly deferential to others.
Elizabelle
WordPress seems to have handled the time change nicely.
fuckwit
@Mike with a Mic: in sociology, it’s called “high context cultures” vs”low context cultures”. cities are low context, lots if transients, too many people to know, everyone let’s get our schmecks out on the table, no bulshit. rural are high context, everyone knowsbeveryone’s business, much need not be said or can be just hinted at, be careful of people’s feelings or your reputation will haunt you fir life, etc
Yatsuno
@Elizabelle:
Wait. FYWP most likely has not yet even begun to fuck up.
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
Yep. Looks like that got cleaned up in the last upgrade.
Mike with a Mic
@Suzanne:
There’s NOTHING wrong with appreciating it. It’s the NE style of declaring what you’re going to do, being loud about it, and then doing it… rather than lying your ass off about it and scheming behind peoples back only to rat fuck them. It’s an odd honor code that if you can get past the “fuck you and fuck your mother” part of the area, is actually rather charming. The entire “let’s just cut the shit and talk man to man (or woman to woman)” ethos of the NE works. There is a higher value here placed on knowing where someone stands (and the louder and meaner they are about it odds are the more serious they are about it) than saying things in a nice way. It’s also why Christie and the other NE Republicans feel so free to attack their Southern party members as being from taker states and that they shouldn’t come to NYC to fundraise, because “fuck those fuckers, they’re assholes and how do those hicks remember to breath, and they are full of shit”. Calling people out on their bullshit is a tradition here, it’s often a race to do it.
But yeah, it just does not sell outside of here.
You’ll also note we don’t have god botherers up here like they do down in the South. That sort of shit is viewed as snake oil chicanery and the sort of “acting polite, but secretly being scheming assholes, that hide behind a nice public persona, that I wouldn’t trust with a lemonade stand” that makes people recoil in disgust.
Why do you think so many great insult comics hail from the NE!
fuckwit
@Amir Khalid: karl rove called him and saud “kid, it’s not your night”
MikeJ
@Steeplejack: 3.7 scares the shit out of me though. Auto updating production sites? No thank you. It’s a great idea for people that run a blog as a hobby and don’t know anything about fixing stuff. I would never allow it for anything I actually cared about though.
Mike with a Mic
@Amir Khalid:
Nah dude, hurling insults and cussing people out at business meetings is a-fucking-ok as well. Hell, so are threats, if stated outright and bluntly. Wasting time, beating around the bush, and being passive aggressive are not. I see it a fair amount in high level meetings with finance types, donors from major foundations and the government as well (my main office is off K street of all places).
Being direct (to other regions this means yelling and being an asshole) is proper, being indirect (soft spoken and polite) is a signal that you aren’t being honest and are plotting. Which is why what many people might call “Christie being a bully”, in the major media (which is mostly on the east coast) is called “well he’s being honest and not a schemer”.
TG Chicago
I’m curious if any FPers care to do a post about how 60 Minutes had a big interview about Benghazi last week, and it now turns out that the guy they interviewed seems to have been making shit up.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/01/star_benghazi_witness_may_not_have_been_an_actual_witness
Steeplejack
@MikeJ:
I meant Balloon Juice site upgrade, not FYWP. I have no idea how Cole’s minions handle the latter. I agree with you that for a blog of any size or any importance I would be very leery of letting some “automatic” FYWP upgrade go through.
As a database nerd I am interested in this stuff. My Cox cable box went from 1:59 to 1:00 at the stroke of the hour, and the on-screen listings were immediately updated to reflect the time change as well. Only possible complaint is that earlier in the day there was no indication of the “duplicated” 1:00 a.m. hour, so one might have felt a little nervous about, say, recording a show at either 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. Although I have some dim memory that last time I had something scheduled to be recorded and it went off all right.
On the other hand, my Sirius satellite radio is happily showing 2:38 right now. Not a big deal, but it will be interesting to see when it gets the word from the mother ship.
Steeplejack
Is this thing on? Apparently FYWP handled the time change and purged the commenters instead.
Oh, for the days of the “Recent Comments” list to let you know where the action is.
John F
@Mike with a Mic: Agreed. Grew up in suburban South Jersey, and people out West can’t believe I’m originally from the NE. They say I’m too laid back to be an East Coaster. That’s cause I didn’t grow in the city.
David Koch
Christie is Guiliani without the charm.
David Koch
@Steeplejack:
Thanks Obama
cckids
@Jeremy:
I’ve read this dozens of times, but, you know what? They raised him. Unless you want to make the point that he’s some type of psychopath, his parents had a major role in the type of person Mitt Romney became.
Which says something about what they must have been like at home.
xenos
@Anne Laurie:
This, this, and this. I was never much of a fan of Clinton, but all the worst people out there just hated her and resented her with a passion that I found astonishing. Coming from a Rockefeller-republican background in the suburban NE, I had never been aware of the seething nastiness that the neo-birchers carried around with them. They really hate their domestic rivals more than they love their own country. This is not news now, but it was in the early 90s.
Betsy
@Alison: easy. Female authority figures,= instant nanny-state hate.
(What do they have against nannies, anyway? )
sm*t cl*de
Kinda funny, though, to see Halperin and his sidekick being used, again, to pump revenge gossip into the Village tea dances
Is there some reason why they couldn’t do their jobs and report on Romney’s interesting personality before the election?
Groucho48
Well, for an open thread, this has remained remarkably focused. I will say, before I move on, that I think Christie is a bombastic bully that disgraces the concept of malehood.
But, moving past Christie, I just want to point out this incredible hit job of an article by the “liberal” NYT…
I just quoted a few of the highlights. There is absolutely no mention of any problems Cuccinelli might have with ethics, extreme right wing ideology or personality problems. With “friends” like the NYT, who needs enemies?
Mike with a Mic
The real issue is the shutdown laid off a good portion of the state. Not only is it by DC, the Pentagon, CIA, and a slew of military bases are as well. Especially in the highly populated purple areas. Guess what the sequester and shutdown did here?
IowaOldLady
Christie is charismatic, like Sarah Palin is. I loathe them both but even I can see it. Despite his record, he looks good as governor partly because of that and partly because the standards for looking good as a Republican governor are so low these days.
Matt McIrvin
@Stewish Steel: Sounds like the Law of Jante.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike with a Mic: Rhode Island is basically greater Providence. It’s an urban state, part of the Northeast Corridor and in the sphere of influence of Boston as well.
Matt McIrvin
@xenos: I’ve been dreading the return of gender-based Clinton-hate to the national spotlight as she runs for president. It got replaced by race-based Obama-hate for a while there, and of course during the ’08 primary campaign we had both going on at the same time even from some Democrats, but we’re due for another round of penis-based insecurity.
gnomedad
Christie can come across well because the Repubs have lowered the bar for sanity. He may be an asshole but he’s not batshit insane. He does satanic stuff like appoint Muslim judges and accept federal disaster aid.
Rex Everything
Thanks for this, Kay. As a New Jerseyite I’m forced to spend way too much time explaining to other liberals how & why Christie is a complete piece of shit.
Rex Everything
@Linda: This is EXACTLY right.
TR
We here in New Jersey have a fairly high tolerance for corruption charges — see Bob Torricelli et al. — and when compared to Corzine, he looked pretty good. He’ll be re-elected in a walk next week because of the Sandy performance (which was quite good TBH) and because Buono has waged a non campaign.
The national stage is another thing entirely.
Rex Everything
@Alison:
And even the teachers I hated taught me something. Every one of them. And the lesson that there will be people in your life who you don’t like, who you have to learn to deal with anyway, is itself a very important lesson. No one could possibly get along with all their teachers, and no teacher could possibly be great for all students. That’s life.
Rex Everything
@Mike with a Mic: I see you’re not real familiar with Rhode Island(ers).
Rex Everything
@Rex Everything: Ooops, I mean Anne. For some reason I thought Kay had posted this.
Southern Beale
Yeah I’ve had plenty of Dem friends tell me Christie is “really a Democrat at heart,” and I have to say, “NO HE’S NOT! He’s pro-life and anti-labor. Those are NOT Democratic positions.”
Not in MY party.
Mr. Beale and I were talking about the whole Christie thing. He and I agree that while the Fundie set may be pissed about his dropping the gay marriage lawsuit and the mouth-foamers may not like that Christie was nice to Obama that one time, all these people really want is a tough guy. Someone that talks and looks tough, regardless of what they do, is what matters. So they will forgive and forget and fall in line, as they always do.
Southern Beale
Meanwhile the Republican establishment thinks they can beat back the Tea Party by blacklisting an ad agency? That’s so cute.
Ed in NJ
I haven’t read all the comments here, but I always get annoyed when my moderate friends here in NJ, who would normally vote Democratic, start talking about how much they like Christie. Not only is he sleazy and dishonest, but he gets way too much praise for his response to Sandy, which was an overcompensation for his abysmal performance the year before during Irene, when he and his lt.gov. were out of the state and unavailable in the aftermath. But what’s most frustrating is that he’s been a terrible governor, especially from the standpoint that he did nothing to fix the budget crisis here in NJ. The Times gets to the crux of the matter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/nyregion/christie-embraces-budget-strategies-he-scorned-as-a-candidate.html
Joel
This stuff will be more interesting in the context of Republicans throwing it out there as part of an attack that centers on Christie being a “party boss” style corrupt Democrat carpetbagger than it was as a desperation defense by a not-so-clean Jon Corzine.
Chris
@gnomedad:
Yep. Which is why it infuriates me when so many liberals (not even the MSM, which was never on our side, but people like Southern Beale and Ed in NJ’s friends) fall for that horseshit. The man vetoed public works projects that would’ve done wonders for the employment of his state, opposes abortion, vetoed gay marriage (until right up until the moment when it became apparent he’d be overruled), and came out publicly saying that he was against the Civil Rights Act, because black people’s right to have rights should’ve been put to a referendum where only their white betters could vote, apparently.
The man’s about as moderate as Trent Lott.
cleek
digby should get out more
pseudonymous in nc
Honestly, for assessing Romney, you shouldn’t be extrapolating his personality from his religion. You should be extrapolating it from his career, starting right out with him being recruited by Bain consulting.
Litbrit
@danielx: h
pseudonymous in nc
@Groucho48: There is absolutely no mention of any problems Cuccinelli might have with ethics, extreme right wing ideology or personality problems.
Litbrit
Please forgive the above nonsense comment–my dog Ruby stepped on my smartphone screen and managed to post it. *sigh*
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Jeremy:
George Romney’s father, Gaskell (?Sp) was a carpenter and homebuilder. Mitt was spoiled and entitled from the get-go.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Stewish Steel:
How old is your friend? I’m from Duluth.
PsiFighter37
@Ed in NJ: Christie is doing what any sensible Republican candidate does, which is to milk the shit out of tragedy and build a career off of it. Bush did it with 9/11, Giuliani did it with 9/11 (not on the political side, but on the security consulting side). Never mind that the only thing required during those times was…competence (which is why Katrina was a miserable fail for Bush) – it would be kind of hard to screw up getting federal funds and rebuilding the Jersey Shore (although, IIRC, the whole goddamn thing burned to the ground in a few a couple months ago).
feebog
Late to this thread, but I’m curious about the health issue. How long ago did Christie have the lap band surgery? I’m on the left coast, so I don’t see pictures or video of him that often, but he sure doesn’t seem to be losing weight to me. Any comments or observations from Garden State residents?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@feebog: I’m not from ‘Jersey, but he had the surgery in February. A couple of before-and-after pictures are here. He has lost a lot, but he has a long way to go…
Keeping weight off is hard. Sharpton has done well, but Huckabee hasn’t.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Xecky Gilchrist
Agreed with what others have said above about Romney exemplifying the dark side of Mormonism. I’d add that I think his kind are also the product of the church’s heavily authoritarian bent – they’re taught that you fucking well obey anyone above you, and when there’s a lapse in societal order, it’s every man for himself.
Watch what happens in Salt Lake City when the power goes out and the traffic lights stop working, for instance. The intersection should be considered a 4-way stop, but it’s really Might Makes Right.
So you can guess how a guy like Romney is going to behave once there’s no one who outranks him.
Citizen_X
@Chris:
Heh again. Why do you think those people wrote those episodes in the first place?
Kathy
@Hill Dweller: I hate the obnoxious fuck. He’s even worse than my state’s former governor Bill Janklow. He, too, was admired for his “straight talk” which was nothing more than contempt for anyone who didn’t think as he did.
Wikipedia doesn’t mention this incident though.
I don’t fear much in this world but I fear President Christie.
gene108
The big thing in 2016, for Republicans at least, will be if the Presidential candidate can make it through the primaries with a “wink and nod” to the crazies versus a “loud and vocal” demonstration of support to the crazies that make up the base.
2008 started trending towards “loud and vocal”, and 2012 was even more of an embrace of “loud and vocal” as guys like Santorum and Gingrich actually won states.
Reagan, Bush, Sr and Bush, Jr. only had to get through primaries with mostly a “wink and a nod” to the base. Reagan brought up states rights and Bush, Jr. had his “compassionate conservatism” that was devoid of any specifics.
As much as people say Christie’s schtick won’t sell in the Midwest, there’s plenty of time to spruce up his image for a run in 2016. He’s toned down the bullying over the past couple of years. Also everyone seems focused that Hillary will be the nominee in 2016 for the Democrats. I wouldn’t be surprised, if she ran, but she’s going to be 69 years old in 2016 and who knows, if she can handle the strain of a Presidential campaign at that age. She had some health issues herself at the end of her tenure as Sec of State.
I’m not sure, if another Democrat can strike up the same level of enthusiasm Hillary would kick up. There’s something to be said for voter enthusiasm with regards to voting for the first black or woman for President that helped turn out in 2008.
If Hillary does not run, will the enthusiasm be there for another middle-aged white guy? Or will it be a let down?
If Christie can get through the primaries with a “wink and nod” to the crazies, he can be as formidable a candidate as any Republican out there. As terrible a candidate as Romney was he still came away with 47% of the vote. Pick off 3% of Democratic leaning voters and you have a Republican President. Even McCain, with all the baggage of Bush & Co. and a collapsing economy front-and-center, still got almost 46% of the vote.
The Republican path to the Presidency is harder than a Democrats, but the electoral map is no where near as daunting as it was compared to the beat downs Reagan and Bush, Sr. put on Democratic candidates. The right candidate and the right circumstances can flip just enough votes to get a Republican elected. The margin of victory for a Republican won’t be more than Bush, Jr. had in 2004, but that’s all that’s needed for a win.
The thing to remember about Christie, at least at the state level, is he’s basically defanged the opposition by buying off Democratic party bosses with kick backs to their districts. None of his dirty laundry stuck to him partly because the opposition has grown fat under his administration, so they do not care to bring it up and partly because there’s been a dozen years of feckless Democratic governors, so Christie does not seem so bad in comparison.
The only other politician I can think of, who pulled that off not having his negatives stick to him, was Reagan. For all the corruption, questionable economic policies, etc. people liked the fact he made them feel good about being entitled and not needing to worry about others.
Christie, at least, has the same effect at the state level.
From the polls I’ve seen, right now Christie would beat any non-Hillary Democrat in New Jersey. If he can get through the primaries, with a “wink and a nod” to the crazies he can keep that up, if for some reason Hillary does not run.
Along with a potential let down of a non-Hillary, non-history making candidate amongst Democratic supporters, I really think Christie has the potential to thread the needle and eke out a win in 2016, if Hillary does not run.
Also, too to those in other parts of the country, who say Christie does not appeal to them, I have a question: Does any Republican candidate appeal to you?
I mean the folks on this blog are pretty liberal and mostly don’t like Democrats, because Democrats are not liberal enough. In short, you aren’t going to be the folks Christie will try to win over in Wisconsin and Ohio.
Pogonip
@Litbrit: Your dog makes more sense than the Fox talking heads. H.
Omnes Omnibus
@gene108:
Not the point. It’s not whether he or any other Republican appeals to me; none do. It is that a person with Christie’s personality and style is unlikely to appeal to the people in my area of the country.
Stewish Steel
@Matt McIrvin: Never heard of it. Very interesting! My friend is indeed Swedish/Norwegian.
gene108
@gene108:
I also want to add Bush, Jr. had a boat load of questionable business deals in his past that were as bad or worse than Whitewater was for the Clintons.
He was constantly bailed out by family contacts, may have violated insider trading rules, when his dad was President, has a brother who got in a crap-ton of trouble over the savings and loan scandal and for FFS the bin Laden family was in early investor in some of his business dealings.
None of that got through to the electorate in 2000 or 2004, who were decided to vote for him.
The right-wing and right-wing leaning electorate has a great ability to employ double think / cognitive dissonance if it’ll help their guy win.
Do you honestly think that Christie’s dirty laundry won’t be swept under the rug or played down in a Presidential election? Every Republican has had the benefit of the doubt about their past, while the right-wing dominated media gins up controversy after controversy about the Democratic challenger.
Wasn’t John McCain one of the Keating Five? Yet Jeremiah Wright saying “god Damn America” taken out of context was a bigger issue in the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Unless a Republican starts murdering babies on T.V. (I think they’d get a pass, if they stopped after just one baby because “boys will be boys”), there doesn’t seem to be a lot, with regards to corruption that seems to dog them, unless there’s a Democrat with huge gobs of money, like Obama managed to raise in 2008 and 2012, to keep up the attack.
Obama’s a fundraising Juggernaut that has never been seen before in American politics. Can another Democrat match what he did? Can another Democrat generate the enthusiasm needed to raise a $1 billion dollars?
Otherwise I do not see Republican corruption sticking to a Republican candidate in a national election.
Stewish Steel
@GHayduke (formerly lojasmo): Mid forties.
Duluth: The San Francisco of the Midwest! I liked it a lot.
Omnes Omnibus
@Stewish Steel: Another related Scandinavian concept is Lagom.
gene108
@Omnes Omnibus:
Christie’s public bullying was early in his tenure. He’s toned it down.
He’s mostly amiable with the press and has the drive and can develop the discipline needed to become a national candidate.
I think the big issue for Christie, is if he has to wear his wing-nut flag on his sleeve to make it through the primary or if he can get away with just saying he’s anti-abortion and has always been (this is true BTW, but he’s not in a position to stick a transvaginal wand in every Jersey Girl’s va-jay-jay, with a Democratic legislature to keep him in check) or if he has come out and state how he’s going to make abortion illegal, even in cases of legitimate rape.
If he can get by with a “wink and a nod”, I think he’s toned down the bullying enough to appeal to enough white male independent voters to have a real shot at winning in 2016.
feebog
@gene108:
Its not the Presidential election he has to worry about. You don’t think Cruz, Paul, Rubio or any number of other potential candidates won’t ratfuck him at every chance? They are going to hit him especially hard on his record in New Jersey, which is not great.
Chris
@Citizen_X:
Oh, knowing Roddenberry, I’m sure religion was at the top of his mind when writing these episodes.
But that’s the beautiful thing about science fiction; it takes inspiration from the real world, but since it’s not the real world, it can be about whatever the viewer wants it to be. Are those “paradise on the surface, but something ugly underneath” episodes supposed to be about religion in general? Only certain kinds of religion? Communism? The latest version of the American Dream in 1950s middle class suburbia? All of the above? None of the above? It’s all up to the viewer…
Chris
@gene108:
Huh. OT, but – isn’t that also how the Roosevelt administration asserted its authority throughout the country? Use the New Deal, among other things, as a patronage system that rewarded local bosses who played ball and punished those who didn’t (this was the era that killed Tammany Hall)? I’ll give Christie this much, he knows what he’s doing.
@gene108:
There’s also the fact that they really don’t see what their Galtian Overlords are doing (insider trading, tax dodging, [insert white collar crime here]) as “corruption.” It’s just a man doing what he must on the way to greatness. If he happens to break a few laws along the way, it’s the fault of the Damn Gub’mint for overregulating all that stuff in the first place, because they’re trying to put limits on success.
@feebog:
The question is whether Cruz, Paul, Rubio and all the others will be any more successful at making headway against Christie than Bachmann, Cain, Perry, Santorum and all the rest did against Romney. He took some serious punches from his peers (and he was an easier target than Christie will ever be), but none of it mattered in the end, he still got the nomination.
cleek
@gene108:
the primaries don’t start for 18 months.
who, in November 2005 had any enthusiasm for primary candidate Barack Obama?
Nutella
@GHayduke (formerly lojasmo):
George Romney grew up in a poor and struggling family. They were prosperous in Mexico, where George was born, but left as refugees when he was 5, subsisted for a while on government relief, and then during his whole childhood tried to work themselves back into prosperity with many setbacks. He knew what it was to work and he knew what it was to fail and to succeed.
And then once he had achieved prosperity as an adult he spoiled his children rotten, leaving the likes of Mitt as his legacy.
David Koch
@cleek: I disagree. Obama was a huge star by 2005. The blogosphere never liked him. But there has always been a big disconnect btwn the blogosphere and plain rank and file voters who show up and vote on primary day. Just ask blog President Dean and blog President Edwards.
J R in WV
Dead thread, but I gotta say something about New York. I’ve never lived there, but I’ve spent weeks there off and on, and I’ve never NEVER rtun into the stereotypical rude New Yorker. Never.
People are friendly and helpful, even if they don’t speak the same language.
My last overnight stop was just that, fly into JFL late one night, spend the short rest of the night at the airport hotel, fly out. The cabbie we got at JFK was so pissed we weren’t going a long way, he had waited 3 hours to imget to the front of the cabbie line.
I told him, “Look, don’t be upset, we’ll take care of you on the tip…” he didn’t believe it for a second. It was about 3 or 4 miles, 10 or 15 minutes to the hotel. Almost $20 on the meter instead of a $60 trip to Mid-town. So I tipped him the change from $40. Maybe not quite what he would have made with tyip to Manhatten, but it only took him 30 minutes.
He was all smiles carrying the luggage into the hotel lobby. Same everywhere in NY city. People who are approached politely and quitely respond with a polite and helpful attitude.
So the people who are pricks from NYC? They would be pricks anywhere. Just like Romney, who was a prick NOT from NYC.