Yesterday, at Monmouth racetrack in New Jersey, the crowd was there to cheer home state horse American Pharaoh after the Triple Crown winner won another race. Stepping into the Winner's Circle, presidential candidate and Governor Chris Christie must have thought it would be his moment to bask in the glory of another large farm beast and receive a bit of adulation himself. Now, your average horse race fan is not generally a bleeding heart liberal, but they do know how to cheer for winners and how to treat losers. So they booed Christie, loudly, the kind of boo that only a large percentage of a crowd of 61,000 can make. Then they cheered the horse's trainer and owner who said Christie's name, which led to more boos.
This really happened. The governor of New Jersey was given a huge, audible hooting of derision from the crowd. Because the people of the Garden State now fucking hate Chris Christie. He is the big-mouthed motherfucker who promised to give a shit but turned his back on his state for the chance to lose a presidential race. He was supposed to be the straight-talking teller of hard truths, but he turned out to be just another vindictive bully. It worked for a little while, when Jersey wanted him to take lunch money from the feds for Sandy relief. But once Bridgegate and every other (so far minor) scandal took their toll, he went from being the bruiser Jersey loved to the Bluto it wanted Popeye to beat the shit out of. Christie was always a myth. He was always 300 pounds of shit in a 100 pound bag. Mythic images, though, are like Icarus (and sometimes they are exactly Icarus), and this motherfucker flew way too close to the sun.
So in Jersey, the state Christie has all but abandoned, the citizens are alternately amused and disgusted at his flailing campaign. Here's Christie, whose staff closed the George Washington Bridge as political retribution and who himself canceled a new rail tunnel that would have vastly improved life for the state's citizens, trying to say he's on the side of commuters when it comes to the incredible failure of his administration to do dick about the decaying mass transit infrastructure: "Here's the way we fix it. If I am president of the United States, I call a meeting between the president, my secretary of transportation, the governor of New York, and the governor of New Jersey."
You might think, "Hey, he's governor of New Jersey. Why doesn't he get a meeting with the other parties?" But then you're thinking with your rational brain and not your political pandering brain, which must calculate how many blow jobs the Koch brothers will require for every statement you make.
Christie the bully, the man who probably doesn't remember giving David Wildstein shit swirlies in the locker room at their high school, emerged again yesterday on This Week with Jake Tapper's Resting Asshole Face. Tapper asked, "During your first term as governor, you were fond of saying that you can treat bullies in one of two ways — quote — 'You can either sidle up to them or you can punch them in the face.' You said, 'I like to punch them in the face.' At the national level, who deserves a punch in the face?"
Without missing a beat, Christie said, "Oh, the national teachers' union," going on to explain, "[T]hey are the single most destructive force in public education in America. I have been saying that since 2009. I have got the scars to show it. But I'm never going to stop saying it, because they never change their stripes."
Drama queen rhetoric aside, a reflective man wouldn't readily admit that he wants to punch in the face a group that represents significant numbers of women. A thoughtful man might have said, "Democrats in Congress," just to spread the pain. A wise man might have said, "Well, I don't actually want to punch anyone in the face." Christie is neither. And asking a bully who he thinks the bullies are is like asking a public masturbator who the perverts are.
In Jersey, the citizens are gonna pop a cold one and sit on the shore and bask in the last month of summer. They will watch Christie's political death with the kind of joy one gets from seeing the asshole who revs his engine blow it out. They will await their chance to boo him again, ready to be in another arena and give a thumbs down.
