First, though Christie has some good points in taking on the perversity of public sector unions, he's a big-government statist. I don't care what party label he wears. If this takes him out of contention for the 2016 Republican nomination, that's a good thing.
What we are talking about is that some of his aides, almost certainly with Christie's knowledge and approval, conspired to unnecessarily close lanes on the George Washington bridge going into Manhattan from New Jersey. It was a vindictive political strike against the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ, who failed to endorse Christie for re-election. Of course, like a lot of government gangsterism, the real suffering fell upon the average citizen.
Christie and Obama have a lot in common. Both are petty men who use the power of government -- handed to them in trust by their constituents -- against their political enemies. Christie's lane closures lasted for four days in September 2013 and adversely impacted response by emergency vehicles:
A local New Jersey paper reported that, as a result of the lane closures, emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations. One involved an unconscious 91-year-old woman who later died of cardiac arrest and another, a car accident, in which four people were injured.
That's bad, but it is not as bad as what happened in Benghazi. Nor is it as bad as what happened with the Mexican gun-running carried out by Eric Holder's Justice Department and the ATF in their Fast and Furious ploy. Not being a commuter into New York, I would also say that a president using IRS against his political opponents -- something done by Obama and Clinton and Richard Nixon -- is also worse. Nobody died, I don't suppose, but the IRS can be worse than death in some ways.
When Reuters or the AP or NBCABCCBSCNN starts talking about "The President, enmeshed in scandal ..." I might start taking them seriously.
Obama, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton stood before the American people in September 2012 and proclaimed that Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods died as a result of a Youtube video. That was a lie, and they knew it was a lie.
Obama and Holder knew what was going on with Fast and Furious. The plan was to blame the violence in Mexico on American "assault rifles" in the hope of imposing more restrictions on the manufacture and ownership of such arms in this country. Brian Terry paid for those political maneuverings with his life.
Much information on the Sandy Hook school shootings is still being suppressed. Will we be surprised if we never learn the full story? And if we do, will we be surprised to learn that we were fed misinformation to further the gun-grabbing agenda of the current regime?
What we should learn from Christie's scandal is not just that Chris Christie is a fat slob with no self-control who has no qualms about using the power of his office to attack his political enemies via the suffering of the citizens who voted for him, but that government at all levels has great potential for minor as well as major abuse.
We should conclude that it cannot be trusted -- no politician of any stripe can be trusted. No bureaucracy can be trusted. No government agent can be trusted. All must be accountable. There must be checks and balances. Government can NEVER be allowed to have a monopoly on power.
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