Christie Knows Nothing & Assorted Conservative Bunk

John Bannerman as Sgt. Schultz

During his weekly "Ask the Governor" radio show on NJ 101.5 FM last night, Republican NJ Governor Christie boldly continued to try and maintain the laughable assertion that he "knew nothing" about Bridgegate.

This despite the sworn testimony by former top aides to Christie that he knew all along.

Even though Bridgegate "mastermind" David Wildstein recently testified under oath in court that Christie was in the know about the astonishingly crooked scheme to punish Democratic Ft. Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich for not endorsing Christie by intentionally causing a massive traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, Christie continues to pull a "Sgt. Schultz".

Not to amuse, as the brilliant character actor John Bannerman famously did in his classic role as the gullible German POW camp guard in the 60's television series Hogan's Heroes

did.

His signature punchline, "I know nothing!", uttered during his efforts to turn a blind eye to the zany hijinks of the Allied POW's under his watch, may have fooled his equally clueless commanding officer Colonel Klink, but it never fooled anyone else; and that's kind of what Christie's doubling-down on his denials about knowing about Bridgegate are coming off as.    

It was sad but interesting to listen to the embattled Christie further shred the tattered remnants of his once sterling political reputation Tuesday night by trying to pin Donald Trump's disastrous performance during the widely-watched first 2016 presidential debate on moderator Lester Holt by calling the respected NBC News anchor an "idiot" for challenging Trump's views on the controversial "Stop and Frisk" police policy.

Which strikes me as an interesting insult to use considering that last week during an interview with Bill O'Reilly on Fox, Trump tried to fan the flames of the eternal Republican conspiracy about "liberal media bias" by insisting that NBC is biased against conservatives and then making the unfounded suggestion that the debate was somehow rigged because Holt was a Democrat.


Holt has been a registered Republican since 2003. Idiot indeed...

Of course Christie isn't the only high-profile Republican to make eye-opening public statements that are more characteristic of a bloviating loudmouth dummkopf this week.

Conservative one-trick pony Rudy Giuliani did his best to kick up some positive spin on Trump's debate implosion and clear lack of preparation by calling Hillary Clinton "stupid" and eagerly joining the conservative media clarion call to blame Lester Holt for Trump's epic fail on a nationally televised stage.

Which is hardly surprising, conservative Trump supporters are still miffed that a joint CNN/ORC poll
as well as a joint NBC News / SurveyMonkey poll showed that a majority of respondents thought Hillary won the debate.

Her performance also scored her a nice 4-point bump in the polls by, in part, keeping her cool on the podium Monday night - including her smooth invitation for viewers to visit her Website to read some of Trump's numerous outrageous falsehoods which are carefully listed and fact-checked on the site.

Not surprisingly Fox News quickly kicked into overdrive in an effort to try and put a new spin on Trump's erratic gaff-prone performance on Monday by unleashing a flood of excuses and nonsensical bunk in an attempt to fight the facts quoted and used so effectively by Clinton during the debate.   

For example as a MediaMatters.org article reported, earlier this evening on On the Record with Brit Hume on Fox News, a panel of three white people agreed that the debunked Birther movement was not racist.

Over on conservative talk radio the consistently tone-deaf Rush Limbaugh actually tried to build on Trump's misogynistic treatment of the then-teenage Miss Universe Alicia Machado by calling her "a porn star" based on some unsupported allegations in a smear article published by The Daily Caller.

Not surprisingly The Daily Caller is a right-wing news Website founded by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson with $3 million in funding from the wealthy Koch-like conservative backer Foster Friess.

Friess is the notoriously Islamophobic multi-millionaire supporter of right-wing Christian causes who blamed the Columbine massacre on liberals; check out ThinkProgress.org's 'Seven Facts Your Need To Know' about this guy.

From Trump's debate performance on Monday, to Christie's denial of his knowledge of Bridgegate, to Fox News and conservative talk media's injection of concocted bunk into the isolated conservative echo-chamber, Republicans have pulled a collective Sgt. Schultz this week:

They know nothing.

Ideology Over Principled Leadership

Well my favorite Republican governor was back in the news today, and as has been the case in recent months, that wasn't really a good thing.

For him or the people of New Jersey.

Chris Christie's reputation is now inextricably linked with three different toxic issues that aren't going away anytime soon.

1) The Bridgegate scandal he engineered back in 2013 is about to come back and roost in his life like a vicious vindictive chicken.

2) The critical Transportation Trust Fund that keeps vital infrastructure projects (things like roads and bridges...) in New Jersey financed is now out of money due in large part to Christie's stubborn refusal to budge on his disturbing obsession with cutting taxes - even when it's not in the state's fiscal interest.

3) He's hitched his wagon and political legacy to Donald Trump.

Let's take a quick look at Bridgegate first.

It was just last week when the transcript of a text message between former Christie aide Christina Renna and Pete Sheridan (a former Christie re-election adviser who's currently one of the top officials in New Jersey's Republican party) offered damning proof that not only did Christie and his top officials know about Bridgegate, but that Christie himself lied in a 2013 press conference in which he claimed neither he or his staff were aware of the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge.

Former Port Authority official Bill Baroni

Those transcripts were submitted by lawyers for Bill Baroni, the disgraced former deputy executive director of the Port Authority for New York and New Jersey.

Remember him? Back in 2013 he was the guy who told an investigative committee of the NJ legislature while under subpoena that the lane closures were part of "a traffic study."

He'll be in federal court next month to face charges that he used his position at the Port Authority to engineer the lane closures.

It's a pretty good bet that nothing good for Christie is going to come out of that trial as Baroni and his lawyers try to salvage what's left of his shredded reputation by selling Christie up the river.

Oh and Baroni won't be alone in court starting September 12th, Bridget Anne Kelly, the former deputy chief of staff to Christie and author of the now famous "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" text message to ex-Christie adviser David Wildstein, will be there as well facing seven counts including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and deprivation of civil rights.

The trial starts about ten days from when early voting for the 2016 presidential election begins in some states, so the fallout and details from that highly-anticipated trial are going to put a real crimp in Christie's style as Donald Trump struggles to try and right his sinking presidential campaign.

Stephen Bannon

Christie is heading up Trump's White House transition team, but I'm not sure whether he had anything to do with Trump's decision to name the combative hyper-conservative Breitbart News executive  Stephen Bannon to replace Paul Manafort as the new head of Trump's presidential campaign.

Bannon is known less as a "journalist" than as a peddler of quasi-delusional paranoid theories that feed Tea Party insanity who helped bring an even more racist and misogynist tone to Brietbart.


Thought Trump's campaign was a trainwreck before?

Just wait a few days and see what a crass bigot like Bannon who fawns over Sarah Palin and has no experience running a political campaign brings to Trump's rapidly fading presidential hopes; and in turn, Christie's political ambitions.

But probably the saddest aspect of Christie's political and professional devolution is something all too familiar to folks in New Jersey - his consistent unwillingness to put the needs of the people of the state ahead of his own political self interest and his increasingly narrow-minded ideology.

Today's troubling New York Times story about how Christie helped Trump weasel out of paying about $25 million in back taxes owed from the bankruptcies of Trump's failed Atlantic City casinos is just the latest of many examples.

Remember back in March when Christie pushed aside the will of the NJ Attorney General and undercut years of costly litigation efforts to force Exxon to cover cleanup costs related to the pollution of the Arthur Kill and Newark Bay in Bayonne, NJ by revising an $8.9 billion settlement with Exxon and agreeing to accept a paltry $250 million or about 3 cents on the dollar?

The people of New Jersey are once again loosing out with the toxic stalemate over funding of the state's Transportation Trust Fund. Despite years of warnings that the critical source of funding for essential road and bridge repairs would run out of money, last July Christie shut down $3.5 billion slated for hundreds of different projects across the state in order to save what's left in the TTF for emergencies.

Eighth street bridge reconstruction in Passaic - Stalled

Both Republicans and Democratic state Assembly members reached a bipartisan measure to fund the TFF by increasing the state's gas tax by 23 cents a gallon - a measure supported by most people in NJ especially since the gas tax hasn't been raised since 1988 when it was raised by 2.5 cents a gallon.

Can you name a single product that you consume regularly that hasn't gone up in price since 1988?


True to Christie's bizarre allegiance to anti-government conservative tax-cut zealot Grover Norquist's "No new taxes. Ever" pledge signed by hundreds of fiscally-delusional Republican politicians, the Governor would only agree to pass the gas tax increase if the NJ Senate also passed tax cuts.

When revised figures showed that Christie's proposed sales tax cut, plus a retirement income tax exclusion he threw in would actually cost the state $1.9 billion in revenue by 2022, the Senate refused to pass the bill - if Christie would just take out his demand for a retirement income tax exclusion (a tax cut that would overwhelmingly benefit wealthier New Jerseyeans) the bill would pass.

But of course he won't, so hundreds of critical road and bridge repairs across the state sit idle and construction workers and contractors are stuck with no paycheck during the busiest construction period of the year - driving up unemployment rates and pumping less money into the economy.

Work like asphalt paving, which can't be done in cold weather, and costs to restart the projects grow by the day, but Christie is content to blame the Democratic-majority state Senate and use his authority not to get these critical projects funded, but to pander to the fringe ideology of conservative anti-tax zealots in the Republican party - most of whom don't even live in New Jersey.

Again, as I've said many times, I've got nothing personal against Christ Christie; but it's always about him, not the best interests of the people.

I'm just really tired of naked self-interest and rigid, narrow-minded political ideology that's not reflective of the vast majority of New Jersey's citizens masquerading as principled leadership.

Chris Christie's GW Bridge-Gate Scandal Heats Up

East-bound traffic on the George Washington Bridge

Want a picture of the culture of vindictive low-ball New Jersey state politics at its worst?

Look no further than the growing GW Bridge-Gate scandal that's already starting to tarnish some of the polish off NJ governor Chris Christie's presidential ambitions.

The saga began back in early September two months before the November 5th New Jersey Gubernatorial elections when Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, refused to endorse Republican Christie for governor.

According to a Rutgers-Eagleton poll taken between September 3rd and September 9th, Christie's lead over his challenger, former NJ state senate majority leader Barbara Buono, had shrunk to 55% to 35% (with 8% undecided and 1% undeclared) even though he went on to win the election in a landslide.

In response to the snuff by the Fort Lee mayor, David Wildstein the director of interstate capital projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, ordered engineers to close some of the access lanes to the George Washington Bridge between September 9th and the 13th with NO prior notice to motorists, state officials and even local police and EMT personnel in Fort Lee; according to the Bergen Record he even told a bridge worker NOT to say anything.

Not only was Wildstein a high school classmate of Christie's, he was appointed to his $150,000 a year job by Christie as well and the lane closures led to massive traffic delays that garnered national media attention when they clogged the city of Fort Lee for days.

For those not familiar with the greater NYC area, a quick traffic lesson. The city of Fort Lee sits on the eastern edge of New Jersey just across the Hudson River from the west side of New York City. The western side of the GW Bridge (THE busiest bridge in the WORLD) is in Fort Lee and it connects New Jersey to upper Manhattan.
 
If you look at the photo above, the crowded lanes on the right are the east-bound lanes of the upper deck of the GW heading into Manhattan. Those drivers are trying to get to Route 9A, which takes traffic south along the Hudson Parkway down to the West Side Highway of Manhattan to go into New York City. Or, they may be trying to go north on 9A to get up to the Bronx, Yankee Stadium or Yonkers.

Or they're trying to get to I-87 or I-95 north which takes you up to New England, or Westchester, NY - or they may be trying to go further east over Manhattan to get to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (the BQE) to get to Brooklyn or Queens; or get to the Long Island Expressway (the LIE) to get out to Long Island or the Hamptons.

On a nice Friday afternoon in the summer it can take you HOURS to get from the NJ Turnpike (I-95 north) through Fort Lee to merge into the lanes to then get into that traffic pictured above. It IS the busiest vehicular bridge crossing on the planet.

My point is not a traffic lecture, it's to illustrate the scope of the arrogance and petty vindictiveness of David Wildstein and possibly Bill Baroni too; another Christie appointee who is a top executive of the Port Authority of NY and NJ - the sprawling public-private agency that oversees the tunnels, bridges, rail roads and ports that connect NY and NJ.

To punish the mayor of Fort Lee, Wildstein intentionally shut off access lanes for all that traffic to merge onto the GW. When the public started demanding answers, Baroni claimed the lane closures were for a "traffic study". But no such study existed and what's now becoming clear is that top Christie appointees snarled traffic for hundreds of thousands of motorists for days so they could make a political point.     

Using a vast piece of vital infrastructure like that for such a petty reason has already led Wildstein to announce his resignation last week in an effort to try and deflect heat from Christie. Hearings on the matter held by the NJ State Legislature began on Monday and top officials including the executive director of the Port Authority Patrick Foye testified.

If you're at all interested in national politics, there was an excellent discussion/summary of Bridge-Gate this morning on the Brian Lehrer Show with reporter Sarah Gonzalez, who's been all over this story from the start and gave a concise and eye-opening overview of some of the testimony from the hearings. You can listen to it online.

Shawn Boburg from The Record wrote an excellent piece today which is a must-read if you want more sordid details from this growing scandal.

Up to now Christie has tried to brush this off and the Port Authority Chairman David Samson has been silent on the issue as well; but nor for long. This is the kind of thing which can nullify someone's presidential ambitions and the Democratic party is already bringing the national spotlight onto this issue.

Part of Christie's appeal as a GOP presidential candidate has been his no-nonsense approach and often brusque manner, but more and more it's looking like that's the very thing that led to this debacle. Christie can't escape that fact that he appointed Bill Baroni to the Port Authority - and Baroni appointed Wildstein.

If the result of the ongoing hearings by the Transportation Committee of the NJ State Legislature and an upcoming internal investigation by the Port Authority reveal that Christie or anyone associated with the governor's office ordered the lane closures as retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee; then Christie's presidential ambitions may be short lived indeed.

A no-nonsense politician may have appeal as a possible presidential candidate. But a politician who will engage in the petty kind of political nonsense that leads to motorists from the largest media market in the world on the busiest bridge in the world to be inconvenienced and delayed for days because of a personal grudge?

The George Washington Bridge is an awfully big weight to carry around with you. That's the kind of scarlet letter you just can't carry into the national media spotlight of the 2016 presidential race.