Chris Christie, is the blowhard, bully New Jersey Governor, best known for closing the world’s busiest Bridge in revenge against a political opponent in a political corruption fiasco known as “Bridgegate”. Christie ran a pitiful campaign for the Republican Nomination, because as a candidate he lacked charisma and was essentially unlikable. Like his prior Republican Presidential doppelganger, Rudy Giuliani, Christie’s campaign could be said to be “A noun and a verb and 9/11,” which was the description laid on Rudy by Joe Biden. Christie’s claim was that he was appointed a Federal Prosecutor on 9/10/2001 and that he spent his time as a prosecutor keeping America “safe from terrorism” after 9/11. This was the central claim of Christie’s pathetic Presidential campaign and obviously the voters weren’t buying the snake oil from this supreme egotistical failure. In this post my purpose isn’t to beat the dead political elephant that Christie has become, but to make two essential points about his phony candidacy that I think speak to larger issues. I don’t lay claim to being an investigative journalist, but the amount of research necessary to debunk the central premise of Christie’s campaign failure was minimal and that says much that is negative about what passes for television political analysis which allowed Christie to make his phony claims unchallenged. The other point I will discuss is the position of Federal Prosecutor that put wind under the scraggly wings of Chris Christie’s political career.
I’ve written much about my feeling that Federal Prosecutors have gone off the rails in their zeal for self promotion, which causes them to misuse the Law in a search for positive publicity. All you need do is type “Federal Prosecutor” into the search function and you will see 11 posts covering the subject. While Christie has already proven himself a loser, I think it is instructive to look at the basis of this politician’s claims that his record as a Federal Prosecutor made him uniquely qualified to protect our country from terrorism.
“On the Evening of May 7, 2007, 48-year-old Lata Duka was doing dishes in the kitchen of her home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, when she heard a loud bang come from the front of the house. “It wasn’t a normal sound. I was very scared,” Lata recalls nearly a decade later.
Thinking someone was breaking in, Lata grabbed a chair from the kitchen table and hoisted it above her head, waiting for the intruder. Moments later a swarm of armed men burst through the front door and ran into her kitchen. “Put the chair down or I’ll shoot!” she says one exclaimed, pushing his gun against her chest.
The armed men were FBI agents and other law enforcement officials. As they searched the house, one of the men approached Lata. He was smiling.
“He kept asking me, where are my sons!” Lata remembers. “Just smiling and going up and down the stairs, asking me all the time, where are your sons? I told him my sons were at work. He just kept smiling at me.”
Lata didn’t know that at roughly the same time, authorities were conducting raids at separate locations in Cherry Hill to arrest her three sons, Dritan, Shain and Eljvir Duka. Over 100 officers and agents were involved in what at the time was one of the most high-profile counter-terrorism arrests in the post-9/11 era.” Thus begins The Intercept’s “Fort Dix Five Terror Plot: The Real Story”. Chris Christie and the FBI played a major role in this terrorism sting, which in the end resulted in life sentences for these brother’s. What follows are the real facts of the matter, which makes real Christie’s role as an inveterate, self-serving bully.
“The next morning, Chris Christie, then the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, appeared at a press conference flanked by law enforcement officials to announce the arrests. “The philosophy that supports and encourages jihad around the world against Americans came to live here in New Jersey and threatened the lives of our citizens through these defendants,” he said.
Christie said that five men apprehended the previous night — the three Duka brothers along with two friends, Mohamad Shnewer and Serdar Tatar — had been planning to launch a terrorist attack against the nearby Fort Dix military base. “Fortunately, law enforcement in New Jersey was here to stop them,” he said.
The press conference and ensuing case garnered national attention, and the brothers and their friends quickly became known as the “Fort Dix Five,” characterized in the media as a terrorist cell that intended to kill servicemen and attack facilities at the base. For Christie, a possible contender for the GOP 2016 presidential nomination, the arrests would be a career turning point, helping galvanize his eventual rise to governor of New Jersey.”
“Conspiracy Laws” in our country have been used since our founding, as a means of dealing with groups of supposed lawbreakers. Valuable in some instances, their use in America has also been a method for suppressing dissent, punishing minorities and padding the crime fighting statistics of prosecutors and the FBI. In this case:
“Beyond the sensational headlines is the story of paid FBI informants with long criminal histories who spent a year working to befriend the brothers and enlist them as terrorists. This effort, both expensive and time-consuming, nevertheless failed to convince the Duka brothers to take part in a violent attack. Indeed, over the course of hundreds of hours of surveillance, the plot against Fort Dix was never even raised with them.
In the years since these events occurred, the use of dubious informants in terrorism investigations by the FBI has become almost routine. When purported terror plots are “revealed,” they almost invariably involve paid government informants at every level of their ideation, facilitation and planning. But the story of the Duka brothers is an early example of this type of case — and it still stands out because of the deliberate and brazen way the brothers were entrapped by authorities, assisted by their paid informants. Indeed, one might argue that the targeting of the Dukas was the prototype for the program of state-orchestrated terrorism plots that continues today.”
Follow the link above and read the rest of the facts of this story, which is merely another case of government “entrapment” which “is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a criminal offense that the person would have otherwise been unlikely to commit.”
Here is a direct statement from Christie used as part of his campaign “stump” speech:
“I spent seven years of my life in the immediate aftermath of September 11th doing this work, working with the Patriot Act, working with our law enforcement, working with the surveillance community to make sure that we keep America safe.”
“We prosecuted two of the biggest terrorism cases in the world and stopped Fort Dix from being attacked by six American radicalized Muslims from a Mosque in New Jersey because we worked with the Muslim American community to get intelligence and we used the Patriot Act to get other intelligence to make sure we did those cases. This is the difference between actually been a federal prosecutor, actually doing something, and not just spending your life as one of hundred debating it.”
“Terrorism — radical jihadist terrorism — is not theoretical to me. It’s real. And for seven years, I spent my life protecting our country against another one of those attacks.”
You will also note that constantly Christie would claim that he was appointed Federal Prosecutor on 9/10/2001 and so immediately was called into anti-terrorist action when 9/11 occurred the following day, thus dramatizing his role in the affair. His appointment actually came in January of 2002, but why should we let nitpicking get in the way of an “heroic” narrative?
The second “major” terrorism case Christie refers to is that of Hemant Lakhani: “an Indian born British rice trader and sari salesman.[1] He was convicted in 2005 of illegal arms dealing after purchasing a fake surface-to-air missile from a Russian intelligence agent posing as a disgruntled military officer, then attempting to sell that missile to a FBI agent posing as a Somali terrorist”
“Lakhani was prosecuted by U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Chris Christie.[7] He was convicted by jury in April 2005 of attempting to provide material support to terrorists, unlawful brokering of foreign defense articles and attempting to import merchandise into the U.S. by means of false statements, plus two counts of money laundering. He was sentenced to 47 years in prison,[8] and died in 2013.”
You will note that on both ends of his supposed terrorist transactions, Lakhani was dealing with government agents playing roles as “bad” people and pretending to do bad things.
About the Lakhani Case: “In a 2006 article in The Nation, Christopher Hayes wrote:In August 2003, to cite just one example, the New York dailies breathlessly reported what one US official called an “incredible triumph in the war against terrorism,” the arrest of Hemant Lakhani, a supposed terrorist mastermind caught red-handed attempting to acquire a surface-to-air missile. Only later did the government admit that the “plot” consisted of an FBI informant begging Lakhani to find him a missile, while a Russian intelligence officer called up Lakhani and offered to sell him one”.[6]
As was summarized in Lakhani’s Wiki entry linked above: “U.S. government agents were continuously involved with Lakhani’s case, many claim to the point of entrapment. It is not clear that Lakhani, before allegedly being convinced by US agents, would have wished to obtain support for terrorism. It is also unclear whether Lakhani could ever have delivered on his promises of illegal arms to a government informant: When Lakhani was unable to obtain a missile, the U.S. government, acting through the intelligence community, provided him with one. Such counterterrorist strategies have been described by legal scholars as window dressing, because they target supposed enemies who are so weak as not to be a threat, and divert resources from addressing real threats.”
Here is the case summarized in another way by Reason.com:
“In short, Lakhani’s an idiot. After many twists and turns, the U.S. government winds up handling every single aspect of the transaction around Lakhani. This triumphant national security prosecution is actually the story of a 70-year-old small-time hustler who gets sent to jail for buying a fake missile from a fake arms dealer to be delivered to a fake terrorist group at an airport Hilton.
Lakhani is also an asshole, to be sure. There’s no doubt he believed he was doing business with Al Qaeda–affiliated terrorists who would use the weapons to kill Americans.
But is he a real threat whose capture justifies massive infringement on civil liberties and privacy? Chris Christie doesn’t care. In the NPR segment he acknowledges Lakhani isn’t terribly impressive, but says “I’m not going to sit around and second guess it. What was done was done, and I think ultimately the jury decided that question.” What’s more, Lakhani is “amoral” and “there are good people and bad people. Bad people do bad things. Bad people have to be punished. These are simple truths. Bad people must be punished.” Christie says, “I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know, if this had fallen apart, what Hemant Lakhani would have done next,” but “That’s the kind of guy I want in federal prison, and so that’s where he’s going to go. And at the end, that’s the success of the Lakhani case.”
This case is often cited as a big win for the PATRIOT Act—Christie’s bragging about it on the [campaign] trail this week is nothing new—but it seems like a good time for a handy reminder that this is what “successful” applications of the controversial anti-terrorism law look like.”
And so it goes. Chris Christie’s two greatest national security triumphs turn out to be government sting operations, using entrapment, to round up people who are probably more threats to themselves, then they are to the nation. But you see that is the reality of what “prosecution” has become in the United States. Despite the tough talk from politicians like Christie, the reality is that it is mostly a sham. A Potemkin Village pretense that ALL of us are in deadly danger and these Law Enforcement personnel are protecting us from those deadly outside strangers. The scaremongers in government benefit from making all of us afraid of the terror of the unknown, because from our fear comes their power, their career success and the generous funding of their often futile endeavors.
It is political sophistry of the highest order, but damn it, it works. This is not to say that the act of terrorism that was done on 9/11 wasn’t a disgusting strike at innocent people, by those bent on harming our country and its citizens. However, as we now know, the CIA sent George W. Bush specific information that Al Qaeda was planning to attack skyscrapers with airplanes in the summer of 2001. Bush brushed off the information, as did his advisers. In the blundering of the supposed “grownups” of American Foreign and Defense policy, we have made our World less safe and cost many, many lives in the process. The geniuses of American Foreign and Defense policy created Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Our CIA armed them, trained them and provided financing for them, only to have them attack us in 2001.
In the end political charlatans like Chris Christie are a dime a dozen in the American oligarchy. Merely hungry people on the make for themselves, careless in the destruction that feeds their unsatiated egos with dreams of grandiosity. How sad it is for them and more importantly for us, that their “heroic” deeds done in the name of our safety are merely pretense. My own personal rule for judging our political leaders is the more tough talking they are, the more they are full of hot air, or other substances.
February 22, 2016 at 5:11 pm
Adding on to my comment on the earlier thread; no prosecutor should be allowed to hold such a press conference. All communications with law enforcement should be handled by public relations professionals trained in and following specific rules of disclosure and neutrality. Specifically, it does not matter exactly who in the State ordered, planned, or conceived of an operation, sting or otherwise. The facts of the case can be revealed by the PR person (like a WH press secretary) without reference to such individual “heroes”.
How long the operation was planned, how many were arrested, who or what the target was, whether there were casualties (death or injury) in the raids, and so forth. Not only should Christie have been prevented from such theatrics, the fact of his involvement should not have become public, nor should he have been allowed to reveal them himself and claim credit after the fact.
Were such rules in place, it becomes doubtful to me that such a sting operation would ever have been planned and executed at all. Without the lure of publicity I am not certain the corrupt would bother to spend any effort on it.
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February 22, 2016 at 8:15 pm
Lots of anger and hate from a man graciously given a second chance on life. Almost all who dodge the grim reaper have much love and positive energy. You are a stark exception. Take a look @ all your writing and explain the anger. There are pharmaceuticals for people with your issues.
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February 22, 2016 at 9:36 pm
Think a President Trump might name him AG.
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February 22, 2016 at 10:29 pm
Franky,
It is because I’ve been given a second chance at life that I feel such anger at those who oppress and bully people. As I lay in bed recovering from my transplant I heard on TV about a 37 year old man, living in Arizona who needed a heart transplant. This was before Obamacare and his Health Insurance Company refused to pay for it. He had a wife and two young children. The people I direct my anger towards are those whose selfishness and lack of empathy is such that they bring harm to, or neglect people in need. While I vent my anger at this locale, I can assure you that I am a very happy person who my friends and family think of as mellow. Also too, if you are interested my philosophy about this is discussed in my post “Don’t Hurt Little People”, which you can get via the search function. I do thank you for your kindness in inquiring about my mental health, since in your writing you have shown yourself to be such a compassionate, empathetic individual.
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February 23, 2016 at 1:43 am
Franky:
Is that you Nick?
What are you up to these days? How’s the weather out in California?
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February 23, 2016 at 1:58 am
To hell with Chris Christie. Good riddance to his fat ass.
As my wife likes to say about fat people, “how come there are 2 of you? Quit taking up more than your allotted space on this planet.”
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February 23, 2016 at 12:14 pm
SwM: I think Trump sees Christie as a “loser” and won’t touch him after the general. At this point, from my point of view (and probably Trump’s), Christie fades away into obscurity; Bridgegate went too far.
Trump’s M.O. is to pick smart soldiers that follow orders and will always give him the spotlight and credit for their ideas, and I don’t think he could count on Christie (or any other candidate) for that. I think all his appointments will be thus, even his VP will be picked based on which voters he needs to appeal to. Not Palin, but perhaps a female, perhaps a non-white female.
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February 23, 2016 at 2:41 pm
Looks like a Clinton Trump race. Trump owes Christie. Wonder how many of the Bernie Bros will go to Trump.
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February 23, 2016 at 3:51 pm
SwM: If it is Clinton v. Trump, I will write in Bernie Sanders. So the Democratic Party will know I showed up to vote and refused to vote for their rigged nominee. If that makes Trump the President by one vote, so be it. Losing elections gave the Tea Party a voice, maybe it will work for progressive liberals too. I am no longer voting for the lesser of two evils; I will no longer vote for “more of the same.” Give us someone good or give us some serious pain that will motivate Democrats to change, I am sick and tired of “more of the same.”
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February 23, 2016 at 4:14 pm
i think Clinton hopes to win without the super delegates. i think it can be done. You say you are no longer voting for the lesser of two evils. That argument is becoming stale. Didn’t you say that the last time after Ron Paul’s campaign failed?
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February 23, 2016 at 4:31 pm
SwM: I said that voting for the lesser of two evils fails and creates a ratchet of ever-increasing evil. I still believe that, and I have expanded upon it several times, so perhaps for you the truth does grow stale, I mean how much longer can we tolerate quantum physics? Why can’t somebody invent something completely new that works just as good? Aren’t physicists tired of talking about the truth yet?
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February 24, 2016 at 4:30 am
Rodham trolls are now guilt tripping and shaming for votes. “There’s a special place in hell” for Rodham trolls.
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February 24, 2016 at 3:39 pm
There is a special place in hell for anybody who votes for a Democrat?
The party of racists starting with Andrew Jackson and the killing of Native Americans to the development of the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats have a long history of killing minorities. Hitler even took his ideas of killing the infirm from Margaret Sanger. The founder of Planned Parenthood who basically wanted to eradicate black people and other “undesirables” in her opinion.
And who can forget that old Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw talking about gassing people who didn’t or couldn’t pull their own weight.
I guess Hillary and Bernie will only want to kill white rich people? Fire up the ovens, they will be fueled with greenbacks and the fat of all those Wall Street fatcats. I’m just curious as to what is considered rich, is it net assets of $250,000 or is it higher than that or maybe is it lower than that? At what point will you have to burn in the ovens for the sin of squirreling away a little money for your old age?
I wish Bernie and Hillary would make it clear as to what they consider rich. That way I can take whatever I own above that amount and hide it offshore in some unidentifiable investment.
I won’t go quietly into that “good” night. I have 5000 rounds of ammunition and 5 or 6 military style weapons and I know how to use them. Some fucking socialist comes for me to take me to the ovens and I will pop a cap in his collective ass.
I ain’t feeling that “Bern.”
Thank God for the 2nd amendment, those old rich dead white guys knew what the hell they were talking about. They should’ve called it the socialist tyranny prevention amendment of 1787.
Come get me you dirty rats!
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February 24, 2016 at 8:20 pm
Mike,
And voilà … I rest my case. 😉
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February 24, 2016 at 11:07 pm
Blouise,
Those two are merely outliars (sic) on the rocky path of life.
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February 25, 2016 at 1:18 pm
Bron: I think you misunderstand Bernie, and misunderstand Democratic Socialism. Bernie seems to follow and cite the Nordic Model of socialism; as he should, countries that follow it have routinely dominated the top ten happiest countries on Earth (out of 169), while the USA ranks #69 in 2015, and is falling.
The Nordic model has no problem with people accumulating wealth, becoming millionaires or billionaires, as long as they pay their taxes. Like us, their taxes are almost entirely based on income and only a graduated percentage of net income (although like us, they have some forms of “property tax” independent of income).
Because it is only a percentage of income, the more you earn the more you keep, and wealth can ensue.
The point for me, and in all likelihood Bernie, is not to eradicate the rich or the corporations, but to prevent them from using their wealth to corrupt the government and pay less taxes than their share. The government should be funded primarily, or entirely, by the entities doing best under that government and making the most excess income.
That is the philosophy, it isn’t hard to grasp. That is what is fair and prevents violent revolution or retaliation.
As for your 5000 rounds, if you manage to take out the armored SWAT team, then good luck against a tank and its cannon. Anybody that would rather die and cause the deaths of their family and children over an increase in their income tax deserves their fate, their priorities are so hopelessly skewed toward utter selfishness that they are not redeemable as human beings.
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February 25, 2016 at 2:55 pm
http://projects.statesman.com/news/texas-pulse-statesman-poll/# Clinton has huge lead in Texas. I think someone had brought up the possibility of a Bernie win there. Since she has a nearly thirty point lead in most polls there, and Texas people generally don’t care for any form of socialism, a win for Bernie seems highly unlikely there at this point.
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February 25, 2016 at 3:12 pm
“Anybody that would rather die and cause the deaths of their family and children over an increase in their income tax deserves their fate, their priorities are so hopelessly skewed toward utter selfishness that they are not redeemable as human beings.”
I would not expect my family to assist.
So you admit that you would send people to the ovens who didn’t pay their taxes. Now what kind of person would do that?
A person so skewed toward altruism is not redeemable as a human being.
So now it is on record that Democrats and other like-minded socialists would fire up the ovens if people didn’t pay what they (like-minded socialists and Democrats) consider to be their fair share.
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February 25, 2016 at 4:02 pm
Mike:
I think it is pretty evenly split with my side having maybe a slight edge.
So I’m not sure how you can say that people like me are outliers.
I don’t have a problem paying taxes, I just don’t think a tax rate of 90% (or 50% for that matter is acceptable, it should be around 10 to 20%) is acceptable. Even if there are all kinds deductions and a high income level for it to take effect.
And I also don’t think that it is acceptable to use government force to implement that type of taking.
Obviously you and others do think that it is acceptable to use government force in that manner.
What part of slavery don’t you understand? The legitimate, constitutional functions of government only cost about 25% of what we are spending today.
The rest of the spending is for social welfare programs. And that is the very essence of slavery, where one man is working to support another man.
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February 25, 2016 at 5:02 pm
“The rest of the spending is for social welfare programs. And that is the very essence of slavery, where one man is working to support another man.”
Bron,
The essence of slavery is when 98% of the wealth in the economy goes to the top .001%, who use that money to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, by bribing politicians through campaign contributions and future jobs.
As for your being an outlier (more for Franky than you) more than 65% of the American people agree with me and the same number are willing to be taxed to pay for social services.
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February 25, 2016 at 6:50 pm
I would like to see that survey.
My understanding is that most of the people on Wall Street are Democrats.
As I said above I don’t mind paying taxes if they are fair and reasonable. But I know many people who are scamming the system and taking advantage of it. These are not wealthy people but they are people who could work but would rather sit home and take a government check.
that is offensive to me.
I am all for making the wealthy pay their fair share but at the same time I would like to see all the many people who are just stealing from the rest of us put to work and taken off the government dole. At least the rich pay some taxes. In fact I believe the top 20% pay the majority of the taxes in this country.
So please don’t lecture me on how the rich and the middle class don’t pay enough taxes. Maybe if some of the scumbags who sit on their fat asses and take free money would get up off the couch and get to work then maybe the rest of us would not have work as hard as we do.
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February 25, 2016 at 7:58 pm
Bron: So you admit that you would send people to the ovens who didn’t pay their taxes.
No, I admit I believe in the rule of law, and that rule is always ultimately enforced by violence. I believe that if somebody points a gun at a police officer trying to do his job, as you threaten to do with your “5000 rounds”, then that person should expect lethal violence in return.
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February 25, 2016 at 9:10 pm
Bron: In fact I believe the top 20% pay the majority of the taxes in this country.
So? Aren’t they the ones that this country is benefiting the most? Even AFTER they pay their taxes?
This country is a system of infrastructure, courts, and laws; all built (or enforced) by taxes. Why should the people that do the least well, the bottom 50%, pay any taxes at all for a system that disadvantages them? And why shouldn’t the upper 50%, that are benefited the MOST, pay for the damn system that is benefiting them, proportionately to how much more benefit they get than the median?
The median income (of any kind) should be entirely non-taxed, and deducted from any income before tax is computed. If we did that, and had a flat tax on income in excess of the median above that, with no deductions of any kind, then we would have a fair tax system. And yes, to the very rich the median deduction would be about meaningless so they would pay close to whatever the flat tax percentage might be. And people that do up to double the median wage would be paying much less as a percentage of their full income. But it would still be fair taxation.
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February 25, 2016 at 9:14 pm
Bron: Maybe if some of the scumbags who sit on their fat asses and take free money would get up off the couch and get to work
Ah, you must be talking about the children of the wealthy and celebrities, living off their family’s money. Like the Walton’s! The laziest people in the world, really, most of them never bother to get a job.
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February 26, 2016 at 11:25 pm
Like a vampire who has the stake in his heart pulled out and suddenly returns to life, Chris Christie has come back from the place of dead politicians and come to heel as Donald Trumps vassal. With Christie, who pretends integrity, to hide his corruption he can expect perhaps the Vice Presidency, or at least to be Attorney General. We now have a tag team of bullies fighting for the Republican nomination. The Republican Party’s last shreds of dignity is now gone. How does one take any of these clowns seriously?
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