Now Conservatives Like Chris Christie

     It's not surprising that he scored big in his speech before the conservative CPAC audience. I've thought all through his snowballing Bridgegate-and other assorted scandals, that this might be his one saving grace. Don't get me wrong. Christie is in a mess. The investigations in NJ just get deeper and deeper everyday. 

     We have the FBI asking questions about his fired campaign manager Bill Baroni and the police chief at the Port Authority who had claimed to be behind the supposed 'bridge study' now saying he never said any such thing-he must realize it's one thing to lie in the papers, another thing to lie under oath. Meanwhile Christie, is not exactly what you want in the President of the Republican Governors' Association as he's so radioactive that the Republicans running in the various states he visits will only appear with him off camera-it took George W. Bush 8 years to reach this level of popularity. 

    Still, with the media turning on Christie, the one thing I thought he might get is a little bit of a bounce with conservatives-as they operate under the principle that if the 'liberal media' haters someone who must be a great guy. 

    "They liked him. They really liked him."

     "Chris Christie ditched his purple-state prose for red meat Thursday, trashing Democrats, the media and President Barack Obama before a conservative gathering that snubbed him just last year."

      Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/chris-christie-cpac-2014-speech-104392.html#ixzz2vEdDef1o

     Last year he wasn't even invited. Not after his reputation as a purple state moderate and 'The Hug.' That this is just a pure reaction to the fact that liberals don't like him any more is clear:

     "In 2013, Christie wasn't invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference partly because of his praise of President Barack Obama during the Hurricane Sandy crisis — an embrace some Republicans believed helped kill Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s shot at the White House."

     "But this year, the crowd in the ballroom swelled ahead of his speech, he got a standing ovation even before he started talking, and his first few sentences were punctuated by supportive catcalls from the audience."

      He's become a martyr. 

     "He singled out Obama’s decision not to meet with the budget super-committee during 2011 negotiations. Christie said White House aides at the time had said it was because the president thought they were doomed to fail."

   “Man, that’s leadership isn’t it?” Christie said. “You’re the leader of the government, you see something getting ready to go off the rails and what you decide to do is stay as far away from it as possible… If that’s your attitude, Mr. President, what the hell are we paying you for?”

    Maybe this will give wings to his pretensions that he can still run-assuming he still thinks he can, and if he doesn't why the speech? His jibe at Obama was chutzpah on so many levels. For starters there's the fact that he himself even by his own narrative allowed all the higher ranking staff to engage in behaviour that he himself says is beyond the pale and which may even have been criminal. He someone didn't know that his campaign manager, assistant chief of staff, along with his handpicked man in the Port Authority himself were closing 4 lanes on the GWB to enact revenge for someone not supporting him during the last election. 

   At best, if we believe him, that's almost criminal negligence in a leader itself. When he criticizes Obama for not listening to that super-committee-who's work is now moot as we've finally done with the age of Grand Bargains-he neglects to mention that Paul Ryan himself did this. Ryan was also a speaker at the CPAC conference. He said the kind of stuff you have to say to impress this audience. 

   "We’re getting reports about Paul Ryan’s performance at CPAC, the big conservative gathering — and they’re actually kind of awesome, in the worst way."

    "I mean, the caricature of Ryan and people like him is that they treat the hardships of poverty as if they were merely psychological, that they talk big about dignity while ignoring the difficulty of getting essentials like food and health care. Well, it’s not a caricature: Ryan says never mind having enough to eat, it’s about spirituality:

“The left is making a big mistake,” Ryan predicted. “What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity, they want a life of self determination.”

    "Um, yes, but how dignified can you be on an empty stomach? How much self-determination do you have?"

    "And who is supposed to value dignity over having enough to eat?Children. Ryan tells an anecdote about one sad child:

“He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids,” he continued. “He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”

    "And if the child’s mother can’t provide that lunch in a brown paper bag, then what?"

     "The total failure to accept that the poor face real physical hardship, that affluent politicians have no business lecturing people having trouble buying food or having trouble paying for health care about dignity, is just stunning."

     http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/let-them-eat-dignity/?_php=true&_type=blogs&module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body&_r=0

     You like how somehow Ryan thinks that poor kids can either eat of be 'spiritual' it's a choice-for them. They can't get both.  So now that the dippy Very Serious Media has forsaken Christie, these are his new friends. 

     In economic parlance you'd say that Ryan and other conservatives like him imagine that people operate under no 'constraints' that they have nothing but 'choice vairables.'