RINO Hunting on the Meadowlands

Well, it has happened.

It's all over.

Yep, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's quest for that "strange new respect"  award has run its bizarre course. The award, as described by British-American commentator and pundit Tom Bethell, is reserved for,

"once-reliable conservatives who won liberal praise by adopting liberal policies. Of a sudden, an erstwhile Neanderthal would be treated in the Washington Post as someone who was no longer 'simplistic' and “shrill” but rather a figure who had 'grown' and showed himself to be 'nuanced.''' 

To be fair, the Guv never really got a full run at the nomination. He was only lately coming out of the shadow of his union-busting image. In his quest for the award, of course, Christie tripped up Romney in the closing days of the presidential campaign with a Laurel-and-Hardy-like promenade with Obama in the wake of Storm Sandy. He also declined to name a Republican Senator to fill the term of the late Senator Lautenberg, when an extra GOP vote in the Senate would have proven very useful. He paved the way, instead, for Demo-corruptocrat Corey Booker. Christie's poll numbers began to rise, and that might have been the death-knell for his seeking of the Bethell Award. Even liberal-leaning polling found him deadlocked with the liberals' anointed successor, Hillary "Benghazi" Clinton. The charging RINO had to be brought down with the modern day political equivalent of the .577 Nitro Express, i.e., leaked emails.

It seems that some aide sought revenge on the obscure Democrat Mayor of Ft. Lee, New Jersey for failing to back Christie. How was this revenge exacted? In the time-honored way of local machine politics: screw with the ability of citizens to go about their normal activities and let an opponent take the hit. This aide apparently suggested to the appropriate bridge authority that rush hour might be a good time to enact some traffic-snarling lane closures on the approaches to NYC. As I write this, the Guv is giving a long, rambling, and sweaty news conference where he is explaining, apologizing, firing, bobbing and weaving. Will he save himself? Was he involved in the lane closings? Did the aide act on her own? Did he, a la Obama, only find out about the skullduggery by reading the press? Will he blame it on a YouTube video? I don't know. That's not my concern today. 

I am, however, very intrigued by the vehemence with which the MSM has jumped on this rather pedestrian story of petty urban politics. This is, after all, the stuff of American urban legend. Cross the Mayor of Chicago, and the garbage doesn't get picked up on your street, the potholes don't get filled, and you won't see a snow plow all winter. This is the kind of act that Democrat urban machines do all over the country just about every day; I am sure readers can come up with all sorts of examples.

Did I say "urban politics"?  Forgive me for that slip. We, after all, have in the White House a politician schooled in this sort of thing, and he has been applying it well outside of just local urban politics. He won his Senate seat, for example, but leaking lurid details of his opponent's "sealed" divorce case. As President, he has used the IRS, the National Labor Relations Board, National Park Service, and the EPA to suppress political dissent, reward cronies, and screw with the public, e.g., closing parks, so they will blame his opponents. His DOJ has a long track record of conducting politically-motivated prosecutions, and of interfering in local cases for political reasons, e.g., the Zimmerman case. The media has given his misadministration passes on all those and more, e..g, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, and on and on. Now we have calls for federal prosecutors to investigate the closing of a couple of traffic lanes; we have once somnolent journalists suddenly jarred into action asking "penetrating" questions of the sort they never have asked Obama, Holder, Reid, Pelosi, etc.    

I can't decide if we have a mass media of double standards or one with no standards.