Moby Chris Escapes— Again
Was I shocked –shocked, I say—by the Trenton legislative committee Bridgegate investigation report officially released today? After spending a year of public hearings, including sworn testimony, private interviews, reading thousands of subpoenaed documents, the 137-page report of the joint Senate and Assembly Select panel concluded there was not a shred of evidence about our governor’s culpability in the GWB lane closings in Fort Lee last September. The most famous lane realignments since the invention of tolls, thanks to social and anti-social media, the second Battle of Fort Lee was a shot heard around the world, right up there with Concord and Lexington.
There are those who call the Christie absolution a whitewash. The man is as guilty as sin. You can just tell by looking at him.
And there are those who point out the legal fees involved —over two million for the governor’s law firm, which also exonerated him, and the Legislature’s outside legal help—were a wanton waste of taxpayers’ money. Why, I know some people who were willing to do it for free.
Where do I, an unbiased, hard-nosed investigative reporter, who is chairman of the Bipartisan Citizens Christie for President in 2024, stand on the issue?
Of course, he’s not guilty.
Here was a man not running for president since reading the last line of his Inaugural Address in 2010. Where could he find the time to get involved in some silly act of vengeance —moving the traffic cones himself, as he put it, ironically —even though it may seem typical of New Jersey politics.
Look, the governor may be a two-faced, lying, hypocrite, a braggart, a bully, but he’s not one of your run of the turnpike New Jersey politicians who view public service as an entrepreneurial source of income. Those are Democrats, not Republicans.
And, let’s face it, the man is (or was) a federal prosecutor. He has prosecuted hundreds of crooked public servants, most of who happened to be Democrats. Some even suggest that may be why the Democrats are abusing their legislative power by hounding our Chief Executive with these frivolous charges.
Ants leave a trail as they snack on the public weal. Whatever you may say about the governor, he’s a lot smarter than an ant.
Sen. Loretta Weinberg and Assemblyman John Wisniewski are the co-Capt. Ahabs who seemed obsessed with harpooning the big white whale. No matter how hard they look for abuse of government power and threats to public security— Moby Chris has escaped.
He has come out of all of this as clean as the Passaic River.
I am happy to say all the pettifogging, bureaucratic, headline-grabbing, multi-appearances on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” did not stop, or even slow down, our governor’s not running for president. He has been ingenious and even-footed in avoiding the land mines being set for him by his political enemies in the media and conservative base of the party, trying to undermine his non-campaign. They are trying to label him as a moderate, the worse kind of Republican.
The strategy is to get him involved in contemporary issues. The reason he has given for not speaking out on immigration reform, for example, is it is a national issue, and he doesn’t have to say anything about it because he is not running for national office. And yet New Jersey is the Big Mango the land of promise for the undocumented, as the kind of us call illegals, already here and soon to come.
He can make a trip to Canada to extol the virtues of the Keystone pipeline, as he did on is premature victory tour across the border last week. Because it is good for trade, if not the environment.
It’s not easy not running for president. When Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio announced last week that he was not running for president, everybody believed him. Such is the level of credibility in our governor’s sincerity, that doesn’t work for Christie. He won’t announce he’s really not running for president until he sees the whites of their eyes at the convention in 2016.
In the fog caused by the Legislature’s continuing efforts to pin the tail on the Governor, let us not forget the travail of those who suffered in what could go down in history as the Second Battle of Fort Lee, the commuters who sat in their cars for the four days in the mother of all traffic jams.
As a disinterested member of a community abutting the Fort Lee battlefield, which was afflicted by the backlog of a traffic jam that ran all the way to Wilkes-Barre those four mornings In September last, I propose that a memorial of some kind be erected for the unsung heroes of the battle, those who were inconvenienced and lives otherwise disrupted by the perceived but unproven abuse of powers for a non-existent Port Authority traffic study and other crimes still to be determined.
Let there be a suitable monument to those who sat and waited. Let’s hire landscape artists and monument makers with connections to the governor’s office to come up with an appropriate memorial, paid for with excessive toll fees at the GWB, which are going up once again, coincidentally, today.
I would suggest four orange cones, on a base of asphalt.
With my influence, I might be able to get the Governor to deliver the dedication speech, showing he had no hard feelings.
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Marvin Kitman
December 9, 2014