What Chris Christie didn't know

 

It's a bit rich to hear Obama apologists in the media rip Chris Christie for not knowing what his subordinates were up to.  President Turnip spent the last five years insisting he doesn't know anything about anything.  Every scandal supposedly came as a gob-smacking surprise to him, and he didn't learn about any of them until he checked his morning paper the next day.  

And it's not just Obama - virtually every one of his top deputies and Cabinet officials has claimed ignorance of their department's activities, most famously Attorney General Eric Holder - whose in-box is evidently a dusty, cobwebbed tomb in which memos about Operation Fast and Furious were buried - and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who purportedly failed to keep a close eye on the trillion-dollar project her boss never once bothered to ask about.  Mark Levin had an amusing montage of these Sergeant Schultz "I know nuthink!" defenses about 15 minutes into his show last night.

This is the Administration that pioneered the Incompetence Defense: the assertion that you can't fire Obama or his people because they're not very good at their jobs, and are therefore hapless victims of the vast band of rogues rampaging through the government they want to make bigger, even though it's already too big for them to keep tabs on.  Remember, Barack Obama explicitly said that when he was dodging one of his scandals - he said it's unreasonable to hold any one person accountable for what the multi-trillion dollar super-State does, about two minutes before he called for a few billion more in spending.  Obama's vision of government is a bullet train with a lead foot on the accelerator, nobody at the wheel, and tracks that run right off a cliff.

So now Governor Christie says essentially the same thing, with an added dose of contrition that Obama would never dream of inserting: "In the end, I have 65,000 people working for me every day, and I cannot know what each one of them is doing at every minute... but that doesn't matter, I'm ultimately responsible for what they do."  Also, as the Governor pointed out, his chief of staff lied to his face when he asked his staff about the scandal, leading him to make some highly embarrassing public pronouncements.  Whatever you think of Christie, he's got a legitimate beef there, and he responded accordingly with a pink slip.  

And the people who tell is it's cool for Obama to bumble through years without ever following up on the progress of his "signature achievement" aren't buying it?  The people who think Benghazi Clinton should be the next President insist one of her prospective Republican opponents be held to a standard ten thousand times higher than hers?  Obama's Incompetence Defense is always a claim of sheer ignorance; he didn't say Kathleen Sebelius lied to him, or fire her for doing so.  On the contrary, the Administration's official position is that she did a heckuva job.  Everybody did a heckuva job on ObamaCare, even though nobody knew what anyone else was doing.

Maybe it would be tough for Hillary herself to throw Bridgegate in Christie's face, especially given his pugnacious reputation.  (Or maybe that's exactly why she'll do it: because she'll want to goad him into blowing a gasket during a debate, then retire to her fainting couch while a chorus of media loyalists sing the "War on Women" lament, and suddenly Bridget Kelly is on MSNBC telling Rachel Maddow how awful it was for that big, mean misogynist to throw her out without hearing her side of the story...)  

But you can bet surrogates for the Democrat candidate will have a lot to say about the poor judgment Christie showed in delegating authority to people who would do something as stupid and petty as this... and leave a paper trail pointing right back to them.  And that's probably going to come up during the Republican primaries, too.  The GOP will want to run hard on a platform of competence and accountability after Obama's years of blue smoke and broken mirrors, and even if Bridgegate doesn't sink Christie, it's put a black mark on his resume that will not be easily erased.

Re-blogged from Breitbart News

What Chris Christie didn't know
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 15:00:11 GMT