Has Chris Christie joined the left on being fat-positive yet?
That’s about the only thing he has left to do to become the national media’s preferred candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024.
The former governor of New Jersey showed up Sunday on ABC’s “The Week,” apparently feeling the need to once again look ridiculous on national television. He beamed with a delusional pride as the panel discussed his widely praised (by the media) remarks from last week, wherein he said all of the things journalists in Washington love to hear.
At that speech, he said Republicans need to “turn the page” and “free ourselves from the quicksand of endless grievances,” that Republicans should “stop wallowing in the past” and discredit the “extremists in our midst.”
“We need to renounce the conspiracy theorists and the truth deniers,” Christie said. “The ones who know better and the ones who are just plain nuts. We need to give our supporters facts that will help them put all those fantasies to rest so everyone can focus with clear minds on the issues that really matter.”
Mike Allen at Axios called those lines “hard truths for the GOP.”
They’re not hard truths. They’re quips to suck up to the news media that Christie, once upon a time, knew were miserable, dishonest people who have no use for Republicans unless it’s to smother other Republicans.
Christie’s political career has long been dead and he knows it. That’s why he now spends his days brown-nosing TV news anchors, lecturing right-wingers rather than actually doing anything to combat the opposition.
Christie isn’t a hard-truth-teller. He’s Liz Cheney in a fat suit.
There is nothing less brave than being a Republican who dumps on his party’s own voters. It takes no risk whatsoever.
Remember in October last year when Christie apologized for catching COVID? Yes, he literally and publicly expressed remorse for having contracted a highly contagious, airborne virus.
“It is never comfortable to deliver real criticism that includes yourself,” wrote the suck-up in the Wall Street Journal. “But it was a serious failure for me, as a public figure, to go maskless at the White House. I paid for it, and I hope Americans can learn from my experience.”
He then appeared in an ad to lecture “all those people who refuse to wear a mask” (I suspect he wasn’t referring to Nancy Pelosi when she gets a haircut) on “how wrong I was to remove my mask at the White House.” In that ad he said “you’re twice as likely to get COVID-19 if you don’t wear a mask,” which is another way of saying — even if you wear a mask, you’re likely to catch it!
But Christie enjoyed the self-spanking. It was a small price to pay for being heralded by the media as a hard-truth-teller.
Nothing he said at last week’s speech was a hard truth to tell. His audience wasn’t potential voters or supporters. It was the media, and they already agree with him. It’s only Washington journalists who talk about conspiracies and “endless grievances.”
If you don’t watch CNN, you’ve probably never heard of Q-Anon. And who, precisely, is “wallowing in the past”? It’s the Christies and Cheneys still talking about Jan. 6 and the 2020 election. It’s them who needs to move on.
But Christie can’t move on. This is his career now.
