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On a website devoted to debate (civil, mind you), we can all agree that politics is not the arena for shrinking violets. Who better to remind us of this fact than the former governor of the Garden State, Chris Christie? He gives us the lowdown on his successes in a Blue State and his thoughts on how Republicans need to keep their eye on the prize. Even with the mention of “Christie Porn,” we promise listeners a PG-rated podcast.
Also, the regular gang go from the economic blockage to “Let’s Go Brandon,” from intellectuals talking about third parties to Captain Kirk back in space. (Well, kinda-space if you wanna get technical.)
Music from this week’s podcast: Man At The Top by Bruce Springsteen
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I referred to Jeb Bush and Chris Christie as pathetic presidential losers, which they are. Their opinions are pointless and hardly anyone is interested in what they have to say.
You refer to Trump, the most popular and most powerful public figure among conservatives on earth. Your refrence to elections is also pointless because we now know that the election system is rigged and has been for many election cycles.
If you still think that’s a bogus claim then I dare you to have a conversation about it with people who don’t already agree with you about it.
I daaaaaare you.
Go ahead, book Jovan Pulitzer, Seth Keshel, or David Clements and see if Rob, James and Peter can last five minutes countering everything they’ve uncovered about “the securest election in history.”
Are you worried the evidence of election fraud may be true? If not then why not? Let’s have the conversation and put our money where our mouths are.
And no, Mollie doesn’t know 1/8th of what these three guys know about it.
Well…. [a long pause while was the hallmark of the Greatest President of the Twentieth Century], the Internet had not been invented back when Reagan was President. However, I suggest that you review the results of the popular vote of the last 4 Republican presidents who ran twice.
George H.W. Bush won by a net 2 1/2 million votes.
George W. Bush won by a net 3 million votes.
Trump lost by 10 million votes.
Reagan won by 25 million votes.
The Republican umm, jerk, lost by 10 million votes; the gentlemen won out net; and the man who reached out with a smile to our better angels, went right over the hostile press of the day, and had two landslide victories.
Um, no. The Pew folks did a poll on this recently.
44% of Republicans want Trump to run again.
22% of Republicans want to honor Trump and give him a gold watch, but do not want him to run again.
32% of Republicans want to have nothing to do with Trump and want him to have no role in the party.
22% plus 32% is 54%. 54% beats 44%.
Also, Trump lost in 2020, with only 7% of Republicans deserting him. After January 6th, that figure will likely double in future elections.
I.F. activated under threadjacker protocol.
He is pathetic. Vain and without principle. Who else do you know who hugs 0bama and Trump like this? And then he continues to stab President Trump in the back.
Christie was the first Governor to endorse Trump, and faithfully supported Trump through election day. Christie’s heresey is that like Attorney General Barr and Acting Attorney General Rosen, he did not see election fraud at the level that would support a reversal of the election of Biden.
Q: What do you call someone who supports Trump 99% of the time?
A: A RINO traitor who has stabbed Trump in the back.
(My secret is I tell myself it’s a charitable donation…I mean, I don’t think I will join live streams ever, and I already have access to the Member Feed [is this a mistake? I’m a Coolidge level, and Member Feed is a Lincoln perk?], and already have produced a couple (quite amateur) posts, so I already have everything I want – in reality it is a donation saying, “Let’s Go Ricochet!”)
*Oh I just looked, I get an autographed Reagan biography from Peter Robinson – that’s actually rather cool.
As far as I can tell, the only thing you don’t get at the Lincoln level is “groups.” I was at Lincoln for a long time, but I wanted to also be part of The Cats Of Ricochet.
Oh, and then the Conservative Migration group.
Still the Greatest President of the Twenty-First Century.
Did it bug you when he said that these vaccinations have had zero negative responses? He’s a crappy liar.
Some folks are going be very sad when Trump gets his 3-peat.
Christie was on the show to promote himself and slam the likely nominee. Blowhards do such things. His pretense for being on the show was to promote the redistricting legal group. He said that it was necessary, because the DNC gained 8 seats from the redistricting in 2011. He seems to have dedicated his life to correcting the shenanigans the DNC committed a decade ago. He did pause to slam Trump for trying to address the shenanigans of last fall. Christ is a big hypocrite–and I mean super-size. I guess nobody listened to him well enough to care to call him out.
I appreciate the confirmation that I was smart to skip his part.
When I heard that I gave him the statistical call of zero neg responses – with neg responses being extreme sickness and death – considering the millions upon millions of shots distributed and the relatively low super-sick/death rate I get that. But to hone in on your point, heck yeah there are “negative” responses! I personally know 2 dozen folks that had some multi-day hangover from the shot. Not something I would call “neutral” – my own family member developed blood clots in their lungs, and that is not zero. Liar might be strong, but he was crappy in his one-size-fits-all-ignore-negatives approach. Better to leave that to the car salesman.
I did criticize the focus on everyone getting the shot approach that it seemed he was going after in an earlier post. I feel a better focus on who is most vulnerable on down the risk list is far wiser than broad-brushing. Now that I have typed a response to you, perhaps the middle part was only quite good, not “just great” as I said. ;)
I really like that he is on the redistricting thing – I don’t care often about a lot when someone does things that help the grand cause. If Christie tried to dismiss 45 it would come to nothing in the aggregate. He has no sway comparatively. One the other hand, as a pugilistic representative on Sunday shows, radio, television, Congressional testimony, lecture summits – yes he will excel at pounding the other side for our redistricting efforts. Kudos for that. I worry little about kittens going after cougars.
One thing about this that just came and went in about two weeks. Normally when a vaccination regimen takes more than one shot, you space it out by a lot more months. I forget what the typical is, but it’s like three, six, nine months, whatever. That way you don’t get the hangover. I definitely got the hangover for one day.
But this is the important part, the vaccination is actually more effective after a three month spacing. They know that now. That is normally how you do vaccinations and they just panicked and overrode it. I got that from @MartyMakary.
It makes me crazy that they aren’t doing this.
They are throwing spaghetti at the wall and I don’t get why 100% of Republicans are extremely angry about it.
This is exactly the problem. As I’ve said so often, the full-throated Trump supporters will brook no criticism whatsoever of Donaldus Magnus. They’ll give a nod to his faults, wave them away with “…but who doesn’t”, then make personal attacks against the individual criticizing Trump. Criticize Trump at all and you become The Enemy. No better than a Democrat. A “corporate Republican.”
When do we get past this?
Not until both sides of this civil war stop saying “I’ll stop being the way I am, when they stop being the way they are…”
From Chris Christie to James Thurber. this was a splendid podcast. The interviewers were in top form, and the interviewee, whom I had never heard speak, was most impressive.
Like Peter Robinson, though now half a century ago and more, I was once an avid New Yorker reader, though back then I was on the left and was thus totally seduced by the magazine’s radical chic. (I couldn’t afford the products it advertised, but I could nonetheless savor the literary elegance.) Ah, but then I grew up and became a staunch conservative…Years went by…At an upper-class girls Catholic university where I was moonlighting in Tokyo, there was an American nun of “liberal” views, who talked the department into subscribing to the New Yorker. One day, in the teachers room, I spotted the cover: the Easter rabbit nailed to a cross. I gently challenged la bonne soeur, who immediately defended the NY. In the course of our discussion, I asked how she could be so openly in favor of an American political party that was (by then) dogmatically supportive of abortion. She snootily replied: “I don’t think that Our Lord was a one-issue savior.” (I wanted to say: “No, I’m sure that His real focus would now be on federal soup kitchens and affirmative action.” But, being ever deferential toward les religieuses, I held my tongue.)
Ah, Thurber…Whenever I’m feeling down, I reread Fables for Our Time, especially the chipmunk story, which one can find online. “The Birds and the Foxes,” also available, remains oh so terribly relevant…
I was getting lunch at the strip mall yesterday when a large SUV drove by with Let’s Go Brandon on both sides on the windows.
Heh.
For those that are interested, the latest Adam Carolla reasonable doubt podcast had a really good take down on how disingenuous the government’s rhetorical policy is about COVID-19. They obviously don’t believe what they are saying because they won’t go on a wide enough array of venues. Mark Geragos is on it and he is a Democrat.
The government’s position is safety first. Give no nuance, no exceptions, nothing, because everyone will take it as a reason they don’t have to whatever…it’s nonsense…
I listened to your interview of governor christie on friday 10/15/2021. a large portion of the conversation was re: questioning of the integrity of 2020 election. mr. christie references ideas such as “we must be the party of the future” and “trump (basically) needs to get over himself and move on”. then the interview veered to his term as governor of New Jersey. the interviewers on this episode more or less fawned over how he (a pro-life republican) was able to win 2 terms in a very blue state.
re: 2020 election, evaluating what happened does matter. even though “cheating occurs in all elections” which mr. christie purported in order to dismiss November 2020, I don’t remember in my lifetime every feeling something deceptive, almost evil occurring as the counting was shut down across the night until the morning across the nation, then like a leaky faucet, votes dripped in turning the outcome. re: Arizona audit, I encourage you to listen to the press conference by the auditors given around may or June 2021, detailing the precise and careful means that the ballots were evaluated (not merely re-counted). any reasonable person would conclude that this was a painstaking and honest endeavor. then when the results were announced, just under 500,000 votes in Maricopa county were deemed to be illegal, shouldn’t have been counted. this is just in one county in a state that isn’t necessarily known for high levels of voting corruption. the integrity of the vote is the fundamental, most important “right” that citizens have. without it, this is not a democracy. questioning and examining if this integrity has been grossly abused is not “living in the past”, but rather, hopefully identifying problems and correcting them for the good.
last, having family living in new Jersey, mr christie’s last few years as governor left many who live there wandering about his “disdain” for this people of New Jersey. he carried himself most arrogantly in his professional life. I doubt he could win a statewide election there again.
First, you need to understand the real problem and schism. You are completely wrong with your characterization. If FL Governor DeSantis is the 2024 GOP POTUS nominee, we will still have this divide. And Trump won’t have anything to do with it. He lives rent free in your brain.
There may be a few people who idolize Trump in this way but they’re the fringe weirdos and every political movement has them. Those who continue to support Trump do so because we know the great things he did as president dwarf his problems by a factor immeasurable. We also know that the election was stolen, have the receipts to prove it, and are sickened by Republicans who refuse to acknowledge that based on their prejudice.
Do you remember that time Christie closed the beach and then went out there with his family. Man of the people™.
Q: What do you call a self-proclaimed Republican who discounts the concept that democrats lie, cheat and steal elections with fake mail-in ballots.
A: A loser, who will never win another election and a useful idiot RINO traitor who stabbed his country and party in the back.
The fights Trump caused would have fallen on anyone who pursued Trump’s policies. He was reversing over a half century of insanity the direction of accumulation of which have only recently become obvious. None of us, including Trump, or even most Democrats fully understood just how far left toward a totalitarian state we had gone.
The government admits that it doesn’t stop transmission. So how does it keep the level of infection down? It obviously doesn’t. Just look at the news.
It’s communist brainwashing. Don’t give into it.
Aside from the factual response of “they started it,” and continue to do so very blatantly, the main issue I’ve had is that most criticisms of Trump including/especially from the Never Trump side, have little or nothing to do with POLICIES, which – no matter what you might think of his tactics – were routinely successful. But if you just keep calling him “loathsome” all the time, like Jonah and others do, then you make it easy for low-information voters especially to vote against the personality which means you end up with Biden’s policies instead.
Are you/they happy now? I hope so, because you/they got what you/they wanted. Good and hard, as Mencken said.
This is the divide within the GOP. The N-Ter’s prefer vain inauthentic retreads like Chris Christie or dreamy Mitt to true courageous authentic America- lovers who are not afraid to fight against the democRATs and their media mouthpieces, like President Donald Trump or Governors Abbott or DeSantis have courageously done. Those of us who found ourselves cheering President Trump (and his policies and wars on progressives) on, are the ones who have finally tired of the GOP Establishment and their lies and subterfuge. There is clearly a comfortable component of the GOP voting segment that prefers the conventional go-along-to-get-along losers that the Establishment continues to propose.
It’s done GOP. You have lost your core Base. And it’s ALL your fault. Trump did not do this.
And there are others who are ready and able to pick up his torch and mantle, with an army behind them.
The old gOp and their hanger-on’ers are dead. And it is not Trump’s fault, it is yours! You were pathetic losers and liars and it has finally caught up with you. Your Kabuki Theater has been exposed and you are done!
Your play has been cancelled!
I see it differently. I find it troubling that I have to rebut what looks, to me, like an unfair Left-wing mischaracterization of what Trump said. This has been happening since Charlottesville, at least.
I find it much more troubling when I’m rebutting such a characterization not from some Left-wing outlet, but from a fellow conservative and Republican.
This illustrates the difficulty of bridging the divide. In this case, it was Christie who started it. He mischaracterized what Trump had said. You defended him, and I defended Trump, and here we are once again, divided when we should be united.
So I think that it turns out that it was the guy in the video who failed. He was careless, and maligned a popular Republican figure, when he could have been more careful. He could have spoken with precision, in a way that would have been uniting.
I know that it is a difficult job. I liked the podcast, and I continue to like Chris Christie. I’d like to see him up his game.