Why Go After Chris Christie?
The LA Times captioned this photo: “New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie walks onto the stage at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.” They forgot to add this fellow is one of the (many) blowhard cryptonazis festering today in the GOP.
Democratic Party cheerleaders have so little to cheer about that they do the next best thing; they make fun of Republicans. Republicans are easy prey.
Nothing could be easier: just let them speak for themselves. This can be entertaining. It is also useful for scaring the Democratic faithful into keeping the faith.
Even so, somebody over at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters ought to tell Rachel Maddow and her colleagues at MSNBC, the all-Chris-Christie-all-the-time cable network, to put a cork in it. The same goes for Christie-baiters in other corporate media.
They are not helping their cause.
This is so obvious that one has to wonder what they think they are doing. Do they really want to quash Christie’s chances of getting to the 2016 primaries?
It sure looks that way, but it is hard to believe because the man is a godsend for the Democratic Party. Maddow and the others must realize this. Then why are they doing it?
Could it be the pressure of filling all that airtime? Or the need to boost ratings so that advertising revenues flow in?
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).