[T]he better you do, the more voters you attract, the more diverse voters you attract, the more suspect you are. --Gov. Christie, in an interview yesterday, summarizing high-level GOP criticism of his broad, NJ appeal.
Then came Christie's diagnosis of that criticism--roughly, his party's frame of mind: "completely crazy."
They say we can always find common ground. I have finally found mine with Chris Christie.
Yet there's something the governor pretends to be missing. While high-level criticism of diverse appeal (in this instance he was responding to rivals Rand Paul and Marco Rubio) is undeniably crazy through and through, the requisite pandering to the Republican base's bigotry underlying that criticism is utterly depraved, as is, of course, the bigotry itself.
So here, in relative terms, crazy, though thorough, isn't so bad--not when weighed against demagogic depravity, and a base that demands it.
In diagnostic fact I'd be suspicious of myself, had I, as a pol, retained membership in and loyalty to an idea-less party that has for so long thrived on pure malevolence: hatred of off-white colors, hatred of love's orientations, hatred of women's choices, hatred of the poor, hatred of science and sound history and expanded healthcare and modern economics and modernity itself.
What in God's name am I doing with these crackpots? or so I'm pretty sure I would have asked myself, certainly by now.
The GOP's excruciating circus of presidential primaries last year was revealing enough; yet the party at large came roaring back, not just crazier, but more psychotic, than ever. An absolutely pointless government shutdown and perhaps another to come and Benghazi! and a blood-curdling debt crisis and a non-scandalous IRS something-or-other and Obamacare-as-Slavery and, and, and ...
... and there's Chris Christie, still a part of it all. Why is that, Governor?