Prince Of Whales

WHAT is there to say about Chris Christie that hasn't already been said about Rick Perry? Or Mitch Daniels? Or Michele Bachmann? Or Paul Ryan, Rudi Giuliani, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, Fred Dumbo Thompson, or Donald For Chrissakes Trump?

Well, okay, that he's a slobbery slob who shoots his mouth off. A demo which is underrepresented among candidates in the teevee age, but is a mighty big slice of the electorate.

Sure, this Non-candidate du Jour phenomenon has become so common that even the mass-market media has noticed, though usually in a column listed somewhere under the boldfaced Will Christie Run? or Christie Makes Speech link. Those stories have as much effect on the Conventional Wisdom as all those Is Palin Presidential Material? and What Was The Media's Role In The 2000 Elections? stories do, and they know it. It's a free shot. If it was the sort of thing that people noticed the professional Right wing complainers would be all over it, meaning The Librul Media wouldn't dare it in the first place. It's not like they don't already know, with at least 98% certainty these days, what flies and what draws flies, and rational, sensible, adult discussion is clearly compost filler. I mean, sheesh, it's The Media, not the Republican party, which clubbed Serious Discussion to death back when that sort of thing put them in danger of being on the wrong side of Reaganmania. You gotta figure they still remember where the corpse is buried.

Yeah, the question gets asked, but it can't get answered, because the answer--The Republican Party is clearly, perhaps irrevocably, insane--undoes forty years of mass-market media genuflection towards the Nixonian Media Critique and thirty years of blowing Reagan.

We're going to ask this again: would a sensible person behave this way in real life? Faced with, say, a recurring electrical problem in the family Buick, or a perpetually surly, short-changing supermarket cashier, would one, time and again, approach the repeated obstacle as though one had never seen it before? Or, hell, even conceived of it as a possibility? And just take it back to the mechanic who'd failed to fix it ten times, or stand in that line instead of another and walk away without counting the change? Once or twice things might run counter to All Good Sense by coincidence. Every Fucking Time is another matter. As we've noted here and elsewhere: the 1988 Democratic presidential contenders were widely labeled The Seven Dwarfs, and Chris Christie's resumé wouldn't have gotten him in the door. Yet his speech at the Reagan Library and Casino makes headlines.

Seems to me the prudent course would be to wait a week, or two months, until he does decide to run, if he does, meanwhile polishing the What Th' Hell Happened to Christie? stories for when he tanks two weeks later.

The Republican Economic Gospel is now so mindless, so contrary to anyone's real experience, that it can't stand. It's just artificially suspended, propped up like a corpse in some bad Hollywood comedy in hopes the copper won't notice. And the only way the party can accomplish, or "accomplish" this is by sending Mitch Daniels out to tell people the only way we can solve The Greatest Financial Crisis in the History of the Republic is by making average Americans ever more envious of the wealthy. Which in turn, I guess, is supposed to lead to ever greater productivity gains at lower and lower compensation. It's not analysis. It's a wet dream.

And, lest we forget, that's Daniels on the hustings, contractual-obigatorily shilling the Idea behind his own presidential bid, the one which took two years to travel ten feet before sputtering to a halt he blamed on his wife. The only actual attempted solutions on the dais, beyond Jebus or Magic Underwear or Have Jebus Tax the Poor belong to Ron Paul, and would get someone without independent means committed for observation. What's Chris Christie's solution? Double cheese?

Daniels told Jon Stewart at least twice that he wanted to move forward; it was meant as a defense of his blaming Obama for his own, and his party's, sins. But I wonder if we're ever going to absorb the principle. As in, quit looking to Republican cutpurses and Randian blockheads to solve problems caused by listening to them in the first place.