For those inclined, the Chris Christie omnishambles presents an almost infinite number of damaging angles. Today’s best comes from Alec MacGillis, who was bothered by Christie’s strangely (but characteristic!) assertion that he did not really know disgraced aide David Wildstein in high school. “We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school,” said Christie, humblebragging. “You know, I was the class president and athlete.”
Au contraire: MacGillis talked to Tony Hope, the former coach of the school’s baseball team, who remembers Christie as a player and Wildstein as the team statistician. Strange that this needed to be confirmed at all—put it, like the “traffic study” that couldn’t have possibly existed, in the category of facts Christie had to have known already.
That’s the thing about this story—it changes the way Christie gets talked about. When he was easily winning re-election, these stories were the irrelevant screeching of losers. Now that he’s in trouble, people want to hear the stories. Such as:
1) Shutting down a postpartum depression funding program developed by a predecessor. Former acting Gov. Richard Codey, who served between the resignation of Jim McGreevey and the ill-starred Jon Corzine administration, tells Salon that his wife actually worked on the program, and Christie surely ended it out of spite: “Absolutely, positively, unequivocally yes.”
2–16) Listed here by Olivia Nuzzi, there’s no great point in repeating them all. But the highlights are probably the mysterious disappearance of a pro-Christie sherrif’s 43 indictments, and the investigation of Sen. Bob Menendez, during his Senate campaign, that came to nothing.
17) Cancelling Richard Codey’s security detail after having a public argument with him over court nominees.
18) Using his line-item veto to cut political science funding for a program at Rutgers, after the program’s director voted down a GOP redistricting plan.
19) Avoiding any mention of climate change in the state’s Hurricane Sandy relief research and updates—the local Sierra Club pins this on the Christie administration.
What else?
