Sunday, November 03, 2013

BUT YOU TOLD ME CHRISTIE'S ANGER WAS ALL CAREFULLY SCRIPTED THEATER

You probably know about Melissa Tomlinson, the teacher who confronted Chris Christie yesterday:
I went to listen to him speak.... He came out, shaking everyone's hands as he was getting on the bus. I asked him my question, expecting him to ignore me but he suddenly turned and went off.

I asked him: "Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?" His reply: "Because they are!" He said: "I am tired of you people. What do you want?"
This Chris Christie has practically been disappeared by the media since Sandy. In its place we've had Sensitive Lug Christie. I don't blame him for wanting to put that image in his ads, but mainstream journalists have been reporting on Christie as of they don't know the image is as phony as "the New Nixon" was in 1968:





Lately, even when the press mentions the old bullyboy Christie, it's been to inform us that his boorishness is nothing more than theater. Here's Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York magazine a few months ago:
... his anger is directed at different targets and serves a different politics -- more cosmopolitan, less alienated, less stringently individualistic; he offers an alternate idea of what conservatism might have looked like during the Obama years, had it been fed by the frustrations of the suburban middle class rather than those of the suspicious, disempowered fringe.

... he still looks like a bully, still deploys menace as if it were a form of seduction. His crowds come, in part, for the cartoonish pleasure of watching a grown man blow a gasket. But Christie is cannier than that. He is not unmanageably angry so much as he is a mechanism for managing anger, for channeling it and dispersing it tactically.
Yeah, it's all a bit act. He's not really an angry guy -- he's a mere vessel for other people's anger.

Nonsense. Christie's been playing down the anger in this campaign and playing up the (alleged) cuddliness, but the anger is still there -- but now that he doesn't want to put it in the foreground, the fawning press doesn't want to, either. And Democrats, shamefully, have let him get away with this, rather than goading and needling him on the campaign trail, which, if it didn't lead to any "macaca" moments that would have brought him down this year, might have led to embarrassing video that could have hurt him in a 2016 general election.

Everybody seems to want him to have this big victory, but one teacher didn't get the memo, and it's a good thing, too.

9 comments:

Glennis said...

he is a mechanism for managing anger, for channeling it and dispersing it tactically.

And curiously, he only channels it downward, to people weaker than he, not to his peers or the powerful. What does that make him, there's a word for it....?

Chris Andersen said...

Howard Dean screams once and he is deemed to angry to be President.

Christie repeatedly shouts at people who dare question him and his bullying is a form of seduction.

Riiiiight.

Victor said...

"Kick-down, Kiss-up, Krispy Kreme" Christie is an angry man.

Normally, being 'heavy-set' myself, I'd sympathize with Chub's, when someone like Romney ridicules him for being fat.

Instead, I want more.

Christie's a bully.
And Democrats need to start spreading that word, because too many people out there saw him embracing Obama after Hurricane Sandy, and think that at heart, he's ok.

A bully doesn't care how he gets his money.
He prefers something crude and just violent enough to send a message, but not enough for him to get into trouble.

Sure, he embraced President Obama. He was probably trying to get at his wallet, and then give him a 'wedgie,' but there were camera's all around him, and he needed the money.

He's despicable.
And unfortunately, Barbara Buono's campaign was underfunded by the party - besides being lame. They gave up on the race too early.
How sad...

Danp said...

Pufferfish! Republicans may not understand irony, but they've got sarcasm down pat.

Buford said...

I used to be "overweight"...that did not mean I could be a jerk...I slimmed down, and now I enjoy my freedom to comment on overly large politicians...Cristy is a fraud, and a Koch puppet...a fact that the Dems refuse to point out...it is crazy that any self respecting Democrat would ever think Cristie would be anything other than self absorbed, and willing to screw his state and the country over...Now, though, I am a lightweight jerk who doesn't fear the truth..

aimai said...

Jeezus, that description of Cagey Canny Christie reads like some kind of BDSM politics porn. I was actually blushing with shame for the writer as I read it.

Greg said...

I am hoping he will be the Rudy G. of the next election season -- potentially very formidable on paper, but unable to discipline himself enough as a campaigner to win a national race.

Hope, of course, is not a plan -- so the Democrats are indeed to be shamed when they don't take any opportunity to exploit this guy's weaknesses. Maybe the president can slip in a good line about him at a future WH Correspondents Dinner.

Never Ben Better said...

Bwa-hahahahahahaha!

I just happened to come across the Twitter account of one #RafalcaRomney and what do I find posted on October 28? Why, this:

Rafalca Romney ‏@RafalcaRomney 28 Oct

BREAKING: Chris Christie formally announces he's running for president in 2016 and that his dressage horse is a Clydesdale #GOP #tcot

Ten Bears said...

A woman-beater. A true conservative out west here would long for the day when we dealt with woman-beaters much differently.

No fear.