In the tense battle for survival among Republican presidential candidates, especially the “Establishment” favorites duking it out in New Hampshire, some sharp elbows are beginning to appear. And predictably, none are sharper than those of the tart-tongued governor of New Jersey, who raised eyebrows this week with some nastygrams aimed at Marco Rubio. Most notably, he told talk-show host Laura Ingraham that Hillary Clinton would “pat him on the head and then cut his heart out,” which is the Jersey way of calling Rubio soft and inexperienced, I suppose.
But in the back-and-forth between candidates, Christie is vulnerable to an attack no one else has to worry about: He personally reelected Barack Obama! Sounds crazy, I know, but you have to remember the stunned disbelief with which many Republicans greeted the 2012 results, and how widely they looked for scapegoats. Mitt Romney wore the horns most often, naturally enough, but Chris Christie’s positive interaction with Obama during “Superstorm” Sandy got a lot of attention, too.
At the influential conservative site RedState, Erick Erickson’s successor as managing editor, Leon Wolf, has not forgotten, and he doesn’t want other Republicans to forget, either. In the midst of a withering attack on Christie as a “tiresome blowhard” who’s battening on godless liberal media coverage of his attacks on fellow GOPers, Wolf lands this lethal blow:
[N]one of the Obama administration’s abuses that Christie decries might have ever happened if he had not publicly given Obama a wet, slobbery kiss for his handling of Hurricane Sandy during the closing days of the 2012 campaign. Christie defended his warm embrace of Obama’s alleged competence at the time by saying, you know, he’s just gotta be honest and compliment people when they deserve it – a motto he would do well to observe with respect to other Republicans, not just Barack Obama. If he had managed to muster even one of his trademark lines during that critical time period, there’s no telling how much America’s trajectory as a nation might have changed.
Think about it, conservatives. The opening of the borders to ISIS terrorists; the continued implementation of the socialist takeover of the health-care industry; the decision to replace Israel with Iran as America’s closest ally; the redistribution of the nation’s precious resources to those people; and the ongoing plans to confiscate guns and ban Christianity — Chris Christie could have stopped all of that, but instead he guaranteed the tyrant’s reelection in exchange for 30 pieces of disaster relief.
It’s certainly a charge none of the other candidates are having to face.
