Apologies for the puns but they are springing up everywhere. NY Daily News in their current headline (they must have been hoarding it) reads: Fat Chance Now, Chris. Assuming Gov. Christie of New Jersey is telling the truth about not knowing his staff and a NY/NJ Port Authority appointee (and a best friend) purposefully closed lanes of eastward traffic on the George Washington Bridge, it’s going to be a bad time for the rising star of the GOP. The fact that it was traffic into New York City on, of all days, 9-11, will speak volumes to residents of the Big Apple.
If you at seated at the top, the culture surrounding you takes its cue from you. If that culture shows itself to be mean-spirited, petty and vindictive … well… you get the idea. Further, if it is shown that the woman who died, because the emergency services could not get through, might have survived, it begins to sound like the kind of (justified) litigation that could drag on until the next presidential primaries.
I suppose many far-right Republicans are silently cheering more than the Dems as Gov. Christie is not exactly a darling of the most conservative wing. People love it when meteors plunk down as meteorites.
In the event you haven’t the slightest clue as to what this blog is about: the allegation is that senior staffers of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie closed three of four east-bound lanes of the country’s most heavily used bridge — for four days in September 2013 — as retaliation for Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, not endorsing Republican Christie in the governor’s re-election race – a contest where he was ahead in the polls by about 25%. The George Washington Bridge crosses the Hudson River connecting Fort Lee, NJ (and points west and south) to the northern section of New York City (and points east and north.) ALL traffic hugging the east coast of the United States crosses that single toll bridge. Delays during the four-day lane closures were as long as 4 hours.
Two damning emails have been unearthed by digging Democrats. One is: Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee (from Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff for legislative and intergovernmental affairs.) “Got it,” was the reply from David Wildstein, the Port Authority’s highest-ranking political appointee. Another, from Wildstein, regarding school buses stuck in bridge traffic: they are the children of Buono voters (Barbara Buono was Christie’s Democratic opponent for governor.)
Aside from the $60,000 reported as the cost for conducting the lane closures, there must be hundred’s of thousands of more dollars involved. How much overtime had to be paid out to freight drivers heading to New England? How many delayed shipments delayed yet other shipments? How much gasoline & diesel was consumed by stuck traffic? (320,00 cars per day, both ways on both decks. There are 4 lanes each way on the upper deck and another 6 lanes on the lower deck. I assume, from the photographs, the closures were on the upper deck, but have not been able to find out if this is correct.)
There is always a chain of consequences in such ill-advised stupidity. Or, perhaps, they just didn’t give a damn.
Other headline suggestions around the country were:
Bridge Set Me Up / Bridge To Nowhere / Payback’s a Bridge / Bridge Troll / A Bridge Too Far
