The bridgegate question Christie isn’t asking

[ProSense]

The bridgegate question Christie isn’t asking

By Timothy Noah

On January 12, Politico identified ten unanswered questions about bridgegate and managed to leave off the only one that matters: who ordered the deliberately punitive shutdown of two traffic lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge? Maybe Politico was channeling Chris Christie, who at a January 9 press conference said he was wholly ignorant of his office’s involvement until news of it broke the day before in the Bergen County Record. Since then, to judge from Christie’s public silence on the question of who made bridgegate happen, he’s kept that ignorance intact.

It’s de rigeur for a politician in Christie’s awkward situation to bang a fist on the table and pledge that, by God, he’ll find the bad apples and toss them out of the barrel. To some extent, Christie did that at the press conference. “I spent all day yesterday digging into talking to folks and getting to the bottom of things,” Christie said. He said that process would continue. “I’m going through an examination,” Christie said, “and talking to the individual people who work for me, not only to discover if there’s any other information that we need to find, but also to ask them: How did this happen?”

Almost immediately, though, the avidity of Inspector Christie’s interrogations came into question when he acknowledged that he hadn’t spoken to Bridget Anne Kelly before firing her. Kelly, one of Christie’s three deputy chiefs of staff, had authored the now-famous email: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Any “examination” that wasn’t a complete sham would have begun by asking Kelly why she wrote that e-mail, who told her to do it, and who else was in on the whole reckless prank. But at the press conference, Christie said, “I have not had any conversation with Bridget Kelly since the email came out.”

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One striking feature of the Watergate tapes is President Richard Nixon’s incuriosity about who the ordered the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. If you were a president who would ultimately be forced to resign because you tried to cover up a burglary committed at the behest of the White House staff, wouldn’t you want to know what numbskull created this problem for you? But except for one strained remark that sounds very much as though Nixon is addressing the tape recorder directly, Nixon didn’t ask. A highly compelling conclusion is that Nixon didn’t ask because he already knew the answer: he ordered the break-in himself. The closing of two traffic lanes is not a burglary. But as the days pass and Christie demonstrates a similar incuriosity about who ordered bridgegate, it will become harder not to conclude that for Christie, that isn’t much of a mystery.

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-question-christie-isnt-asking

Experts see possible charges in NJ bridge scandal
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024336956

[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[libdem4life]

2. Kind of a version of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He's not curious because he already knows.

And you know that a few commuters stuck for four days had the Governor's phone number and complained to him directly about it. We're not all total idiots nor as clueless as he pretends to be.

[napkinz]

3. quote ...

[Cha]

4. Inspector Clueless

CChristie isn't asking questions because he doesn't want us to know the answers.