Chris Christie takes on non-apologies

I’ll let you supply the adjectives.  Suggestions are “wonderful,” “awesome,” “superlative,” “inspiring,” “amusing,” “brave.”  You get my drift:

Hat tip:  Hot Air

The good stuff from Chris Christie

Mmm, mmm, mmm:

So far, I can still imagine myself voting for him in 2012.  Maybe on a ticket with Bolton or Petraeus, for some real foreign policy gravitas.  (Although, really, when it comes to foreign policy gravitas, it’s hard to beat Joe Biden, isn’t it?  And yes, I’m being sarcastic.)

An appreciation of happy warriors *UPDATED*

I like Chris Christie in large part because he is a happy warrior.  He engages in political fights with intelligence, vigor, and a singular lack of animus.  He wades in joyously, and emerges refreshed and happy.  He wants to win, but he takes no joy in his opponent’s destruction, nor does he thrive on humiliating or brutalizing people.  Reagan was like that.  Palin is like that too.

I am not a happy warrior.  Part of why I’m a sniper (i.e., an anonymous blogger) is that I find direct confrontations incredibly upsetting.  This is true even when the direct confrontations are over the internet.  A case in point is a facebook exchange I had today.  A liberal friend rejoiced over what he perceived as O’Donnell’s incredible constitutional ignorance, rushing to Coons’ defense by repeating over and over that “separation of church and state” is in the constitution.  I very politely explained — with facts —  that, historically and constitutionally, O’Donnell is in fact correct in her interpretation.  The friend didn’t reply, but one of his other friends waded in on his behalf, with one of the rudest, most ill-informed screeds I’ve seen in a long time.

I’ve never met this woman.  I will never meet this woman.  She is an ignoramus, and she’s a bully.  You’d think, therefore, that what she said wouldn’t affect me.  But me, being me, I went into total fight or flight mode.  Had I been in the room with her, I honestly don’t know if I would have hit or her run away!  As it is, I wrote and deleted three incredibly insulting, denigrating replies, before settling on a slightly snide and condescending response that wouldn’t insult the liberal who started the whole discussion (after all, he wasn’t rude to me).  I’m still a little shaken, though.  And that’s why I’m not a happy warrior.

Obama, incidentally, isn’t a happy warrior either.  He’s a bully.  He enjoys a fight, not for the joy of battle, but because he wants to destroy his opponent.

UPDATE:  A new blog on the block linked to this post, making a good point, namely that discourse with liberals is emotionally fraught because, not only do they not espouse the same means as conservatives, they no longer espouse even the same ends.  A good debate can be had about different means to the same ends.  It’s almost impossible, though, to debate with someone who sees the ends you espouse as inherently, and irremediably, evil.

By the way, I did end up coming to verbal blows with the rude person at that facebook site.  I spelled out, chapter and verse, the person’s inane and insane historic inaccuracies.  By the time I was done, my hands were shaking on the keyboard.  The person fired back with another assault, which I didn’t bother to read.  It is impossible to engage in any sort of forward-moving debate with someone who lives in an alternate factual universe, one that is utterly unsupported by the historic record.  I can only hope that what I wrote has an impact on others who read that facebook thread, and who are not so ideologically blinkered.

UPDATE II:  The coda to all this is that I got a very nice email from a lurker to that facebook thread, thanking me for stating clearly and correctly the Constitutional standards.  I didn’t change any minds, but I made one person happy!

Misspent government funds

If you subscribe to the WSJ, I urge you to read Liberalism and Public Works, which uses Chris Christie’s decision to shut down the tunnel project as a springboard to explain that liberal entitlement programs have destroyed public works programs:

To govern is to choose, or ought to be. And the reason New Jersey and so many other states can’t afford new “infrastructure” is because the politicians who’ve been running the state have blown the budget on everything else. For years, Democrats in Trenton have steered ever-more state revenues to government employees and their pensions, while squeezing state spending on the core purposes of government such as roads. Mr. Christie is telling them that the jig is up, and that a government that tries to do everything ends up doing nothing well.

That pretty much nails it. What’s really funny is that it’s the Big Government types who think of the economy as finite, which is why they’re so focused on redistribution. Capitalists understand that a healthy, relatively unbound economy can raise the standard of living for everyone, while Marxists see the money in an economy as perpetually limited, which requires government to decide who is entitled to its benefit. That same Big Government person, however, sees the government budget as endless, capable of being supplied in perpetuity by the same people whose wealth the government relentlessly steals.

Your Chris Christie moment of the day

Cuddling up with a Chris Christie video is better than chocolate.  The first minute and a half of this video is a slightly boring statement about Christie’s decision not to build a tunnel from new Jersey to New York.  Don’t give up, though.  After that wooden intro, the rest is Christie’s usual lucid discussion about his belief that the state does not exist to suck the taxpayers dry — especially for a project that is certain to have massive cost overruns and, typical for anything planned by a bureaucracy, one that was not well thought out in the first place:

“I’m sorry if I have to be the responsible one here in the room.”

The same friend who sent me the video below commented that, for conservatives, part of Christie’s enormous appeal is that he is a grown up:  he makes tough decisions, he’s honest, he won’t let the people around him behave like teenagers (and that’s exactly how Leftists behave), he doesn’t care about being popular, and, as an added benefit, he’s got a great sense of humor:

http://blip.tv/play/hJNRgf%2BbKgI%2Em4v

My dream candidate

I was amusing myself imagining a dream candidate, one that would attract a lot of crossover votes.  I came up with this political personality:

And this physical image:

I would so vote for this man.  Of course, because I’m not quite that shallow, I would vote in a second for Christie even if he didn’t look like Keanu.  But it would certainly be nice if he did….

What helps is that Keanu keeps his mouth shut:  he doesn’t bloviate about politics and the environment.  He does his job and goes home.  It’s the same reason I like Brendan Fraser.  They keep the fantasy alive by allowing me to impose my values on their appealing screen personalities, without spewing forth venom and stupidity on a regular basis.

If you need your Christie fix….

At this site I’ve analogized Chris Christie to both meth and porn — he’s that good when it comes to triggering every pleasure center in a conservative’s brain.  What totally distinguishes him from those vices, though, is that he’s good for us.  He’s an honest pleasure, who can and should be enjoyed by as many people as possible.  If you want a fix of the good stuff today, go here.  Or here.  Or here.

Right about now, I’m so OD’d on Christie wonderfulness, I look like one of the habitues of a 19th century opium den.

Governor Christie: Crack for the conservative brain

Listening to this man is such a powerful rush, it’s like crack for the conservative brain:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=4339193&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

“The day of reckoning is here”

I posted earlier today about Great Men, and how they look at the waves heading their way and decide to leap athwart those waves and drive them in certain directions.  Chris Christie is one of those men.  He truly has the capacity for greatness:

Please note his sense, his morality, his decency, his coherence, his humility, and his intellectual honesty, and contrast it with the flat, emotion-free, blame-filled, hopeless aspect Obama presented in his first Oval Office address.  One man is surfing the wave, the other is on the beach, trying to avoid getting drowned (and to Hell with the rest of us).