Chris Christie gets exposed as a bully

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Last summer, in a stunningly petty act, Christie’s minions apparently ordered the closure of bridge lanes leading into New York City to punish a Democratic mayor who refused to endorse him for reelection.

In an explosive story Wednesday, the Bergen Record revealed a cache of private emails that seemed to show Christie’s staff and appointees orchestrated the closure of lanes leading onto the George Washington Bridge to plague the small town of Fort Lee, whose Democratic mayor, Mark Sokolich, had failed to endorse Christie for reelection.

This is dirty politics at its worst. It's like chucking a brick through a window because a shopowner won’t pay you protection money. No one wants a potential president who acts like a mob boss.

The lane closures, starting on Sept. 9, resulted in four days of what the Record called “paralyzing gridlock” in Fort Lee, a small town of 35,000, as folks trying to get across the bridge into Manhattan were stuck in jams that lasted for hours.

Here's the money quote in the emails, from the Record's story:

"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee," Bridget Anne Kelly, one of three deputies on Christie’s senior staff, wrote to David Wildstein, a top Christie executive at the Port Authority, on Aug. 13, about three weeks before the closures. Wildstein, the official who ordered the closures and who resigned last month amid the escalating scandal, wrote back: "Got it."

Kelly’s feckless email is bound to go down in history as one of the all-time great political blunders. It becomes the smoking gun that kills Christie’s national political aspirations. Whether he knew about the plan, Christie hired the people and created the atmosphere that allowed this sort of behavior to flourish.

What kind of callousness does it take to snicker about the idea that schoolchildren are missing their first day of school?

“They are the children of Buono voters,” one official wrote, referring to Christie’s Democratic opponent, Barbara Buono, whom he trounced in the November election.

We do know that Christie blatantly lied about the closures, insisting that they were part of a fictional “traffic study.”

FORT LEE – Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, according to the head of the borough’s EMS department.

The woman later died, borough records show.

In at least two of those instances, response time doubled, noted EMS coordinator Paul Favia, who documented those cases in a Sept. 10 letter to Mayor Mark Sokolich, which The Record obtained.

On Sept. 9, the first day of the traffic paralysis, EMS crews took seven to nine minutes to arrive at the scene of a vehicle accident where four people were injured, when the response time should have been less than four minutes, he wrote.

It also took EMS seven minutes to reach an unconscious 91-year-old woman who later died of cardiac arrest at a hospital. Although he did not say her death was directly caused by the delays, Favia noted that “paramedics were delayed due to heavy traffic on Fort Lee Road and had to meet the ambulance en-route to the hospital instead of on the scene.”

Emergency responders also were late in getting to a third medical emergency that first morning of the lane closures. It took Favia nearly an hour to arrive at a building where a person was experiencing chest pains “due to standstill traffic on Route 46 East. The Mutual Aid ambulance coming from Palisades Park and paramedics coming out of Leonia were also delayed due to the excessive traffic,” he wrote.

Delays in emergency response times continued the next morning when a call that should have taken three or four minutes to respond to took seven, Favia wrote. In that instance, a man was experiencing chest pains.

To be fair, it's his staff and political associates that have been exposed as bullies, thus far.
For the moment, Chris Christie is denying any personal involvement.

Of course, that hasn't stopped people speculating that ultimately this was his idea. It's hard to imagine his staffers and political allies acting without his authorisation. Christie's initial cavalier attitude in response to this whole saga may come back to haunt him.

Yes he is but he's New Jersey's jackass. Last time I checked they still hadn't towed New Jersey down under and attached it to New Zealand so it's kind of a non-issue to you. Or are you just trying to help us, again?
How sweet....

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Yes he is but he's New Jersey's jackass. Last time I checked they still hadn't towed New Jersey down under and attached it to New Zealand so it's kind of a non-issue to you. Or are you just trying to help us, again?
How sweet....