The George Washington Bridge scandal disclosures contain so much evidence of malfeasance that, despite an incredible amount of uncertainty over motive and culpability, conservatives are left to defend Chris Christie by taking a meta-view of the whole affair. And we’re not talking about random right wingers on social media, but leading GOP message movers as well.“You’ll notice we haven’t been hearing a lot from the Clinton camp about this,” Karl Rove said puzzlingly on Fox News Sunday. “The contrast with President Clinton and Secretary Clinton’s handling of Benghazi. So I think it’s going to be hard for Democrats to turn this into an issue…. the amount of attention paid to Chris Christie makes the coverage of Benghazi, at the same time, the coverage of the IRS, pale in significance.”On ABC’s This Week, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani took a similar tack. “Things go wrong in an administration. And frankly, you know, [President Obama] was in campaign-mode at the time, during campaign-mode you miss a lot of things. You’re not paying as much attention. We see that with Benghazi,”If the George Washington Bridge scandal were a phony scandal — or even if there were a narrow sense in which it could be interpreted as a phony scandal — conservatives would be calling it a phony scandal. By defending Christie with ad hominem attacks on President Obama and Hillary Clinton, conservatives are implicitly acceding that the scandal is real.
let's go out on a limb and say he's guilty, then all the right wing hoity toity's trying to defend him by saying stuff like it happens and he was in campaign mode and missed it, both of which speaks to incompetence, so are they taking him out of the put and putting him on the grill?
as to it's legitimacy the author has a point if there were any wiggle room they Fox et al would be beating the drum and making bird calls to the misinfo squad and all w would hear would be about how ACA is failing and Benghazi and a host of other rebutted lies.
If that’s all they have then I expect that as new details emerge, we’ll hear much more of the same. Why didn’t the media treat Benghazi and the IRS “scandals” the same way they’re treating the bridge scandal? Why won’t Obama and Clinton be as forthcoming about Benghazi as Christie has been about this?The basic idea is to prevent the bridge story from reigniting a stigma of scandal the Republican party has been trying to escape since the final years of George W. Bush’s second term. Scandals are just an inevitable part of governance, by their own lights, but at least when Republicans are at the helm they give a damn about accountability.Other writers have already made the simple but crucial point that for the meta argument to withstand scrutiny, the Obama “scandals” would have to be real. But they’re not real. So it’s an inherently dishonest tactic. And, at the risk of being accused of concern trolling, I think this it’s also unlikely to work, for three reasons.
the court of public opinion IMO is not that far apart no one has stepped forward with any proof of Christies tale being remotely true actually just the opposite, they had 4 months to concoct a defense but in their arrogance they never thought they would be caught, that my friends is the mentality of the common criminal they never expect to get caught so that common criminal does not have a plan B.
