New Jersey Governor Chris Christie just announced his 2016 presidential candidacy and slimed us with his campaign slogan of "telling it like it is." So let's tell it like it is, shall we? The truth is that Chris Christie is a mean-spirited bully unbefitting of the office of the president of the United States.
Even before the Bridgegate scandal, Chris Christie had long been notorious for shouting at audience members and reporters at his appearances, humiliating citizens in public, calling people "idiots" and "numb-nuts," and in one incident, yelling at a man to "sit down and shut up."
But the Bridgegate scandal has given us a rare glimpse behind the scenes and into the true nature of how this man conducts politics and wields power. And it is utterly appalling.
Mr. Christie maintains that all the alleged wrongdoing was entirely the fault of his staff and appointees and that he knew absolutely nothing about it. This strains credibility. And indeed, one of Mr. Christie's former lieutenants who has been implicated in the wrongdoing insists that Mr. Christie in fact knew all about it. But whether Mr. Christie actually knew about it simply does not matter. The misconduct was so outrageous and it was waged by multiple people who were very senior and very close to Mr. Christie that it directly reflects upon the manner in which Mr. Christie himself conducts the office of the governor of the State of New Jersey.
All of the alleged misconduct was motivated out of a stunning level of petty vindictiveness and political retribution by Mr. Christie's senior team. The target of their ire was the Democratic mayor of the small town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, which happens to be the location of one side of the mighty George Washington Bridge that transports travelers onto the island of Manhattan on the other side. The purported reason Mr. Christie's team targeted this mayor was because he had simply declined to endorse Mr. Christie in his 2013 bid for reelection. So now Mr. Christie's team was out to get this poor fellow.
The twisted plot they concocted for revenge reflects the depravity and perversion of Mr. Christie's key people. The alleged scheme they hatched was to close down traffic lanes on the New Jersey side of the bridge for no legitimate reason in order to intentionally cause a massive traffic jam right in the town of this small-time mayor whom they were seeking to punish.
Now, closing down traffic lanes leading into the George Washington Bridge is no easy feat. It requires political power from very senior-level people. And it requires a considerable amount of advance planning and scheming. This was no off-the-cuff slip-up. It was no momentary lapse of judgment that could be forgiven. Rather, this was an elaborate, premeditated plot that was carefully planned and precisely executed by Mr. Christie's senior-level people, and it was all to punish a person in order to teach him a lesson about what happens to people who decline to obey the dictates of Mr. Christie. This is what the governor's office was up to. These people are bad apples, rotten to the core. They even selected the first day back to school in order to inflict the maximum amount of damage upon the maximum number of innocent people.
And their scheme worked like a cursed charm. Sure enough, their lane closure resulted in a massive traffic jam. In the midst of the mayhem, the small-town mayor began frantically calling Mr. Christie's team repeatedly urging that an emergency was occurring. Mr. Christie's team sat back and laughed, cruelly delighting in all the pain they were inflicting upon others. They instructed each other to intentionally ignore the mayor's desperate calls. All the while multitudes of perfectly innocent people were stuck in a horrendous traffic jam that lasted for hours.
Mr. Christie's team was clearly operating in a manner that was abusive, vindictive, and downright nasty. These are the people Mr. Christie chose as his senior team, these are the people Mr. Christie directed, and these are people Mr. Christie had known for years. The leader of a team sets the tone and culture of the team, and the team reflects the values, beliefs, and conduct of its leader. This appalling behavior reveals that Mr. Christie runs an office that abuses its governmental power to an extreme degree, and it lays bare that Mr. Christie himself has no place in public office.
Just as his public temperament suggests, we see that Mr. Christie is in fact a bully.