Christie implodes

It will be obvious in retrospect that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was a speeding trainwreck simply waiting for a sufficiently dangerous curve to go flying off. He got away with a lot, but his increased national prominence was fatal. [photo of Gov not laughing--NY Daily News]

It’s not clear what Christie could have done to salvage the giant problem created by ‘Bridgegate’ (I prefer ‘Bridgeghazi’) once his team had committed the hubristic screw-up in the first place. They might have messed up traffic on the GW for a couple of hours and got away with it, but four days?

Then after the truth about political payback came tumbling out, Christie immediately and foolishly turned on his former BFFs ferociously, reminding everyone that it was all about the Big Guy and him alone right from the beginning. He blamed them in a rambling and interminable press conference, a sure sign that he wasn’t getting good legal advice. But he also trashed them. From that moment, he was toast.

Glib commentators have loved Christie because he’s such a loudmouth and bully, and his political operatives delighted in uploading YouTube videos of him berating one of his favorite enemies to their faces. But he forgot that the people he started throwing to the lions after Bridgeghazi started were until days before his own protective phalanx. What, he thought they would remain loyal to him after being humiliated publically? Based on their deep commitment to some higher cause as opposed to sociopathic grasping self-interest as personified by Christie?

Christie’s career is imploding so quickly that FEMA should prepare for the possibility of its high-velocity remains endangering passers-by on the banks of the Hudson River. He’s now got into a public pissing match—that would be laughable if it weren’t pathetic—with his former buddy-boy, David Wildstein, late of the Port Authority. The governor’s email riposte to the bombshell that Wildstein is going to accuse of him knowing everything about the bridge shut-down contains this counter-accusatory gem: “He [Wildstein] was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior.”

Can anyone imagine Richard Nixon even at the height of the Watergate debacle with his presidency hanging by a thread turning on his top aides like that and inviting them to retaliate? After all the brouhaha about Christie’s chances for a national career, he turns out to be just another goofball in the endless GOP clown parade, a bobblehead that will take his place next to the 2012 line-up of Bachmann, Trump, Perry and ‘999 Cain’, the gang that kept Saturday Night Live awash in material.