Chris Christie isn’t campaigning, he’s rage spiraling. He’s here to settle the score with anyone and everyone who ever dared to disagree with him and that includes Florida’s Governor, and fellow candidate for GOP nominee, Ron DeSantis.
Specifically, Christie is mad because DeSantis didn’t stop recovery efforts to lead around an indifferent, perpetually-vacationing octogenarian who we all knew was going to use the press op to blame hurricane season on “climate change” and that’s exactly what he did. Unlike DeSantis, Christie was mocked for his BFF-esque photos with Obama when the former president visited New Jersey in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. No surprise DeSantis was uninterested in being used similarly.
Christie also blasted DeSantis for not voting for Hurricane Sandy relief when DeSantis, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, was in Congress. I remember this well and covered it extensively on air. Insurance estimates were between $20 - $25 billion yet Obama requested $60 billion. The bill was so laden with pork that only a third was slated for actual relief spending; much of it was earmarked for future government asset replacement. That’s something you reevaluate the budget to include, not tack on to a supplemental emergency package.
How does spending $150 million on fisheries in Alaska help victims of Hurricane Sandy? How does $336 million for Amtrak help? Or $1 million to buy new cars for the DEA? How did it provide “immediate” relief when a sizable chunk wasn’t even scheduled to kick in until the following year?
Did Christie ever explain this?
Yet Christie is mad that DeSantis (and other grassroots conservatives) rightly rejected this?
Christie joined with Democrats to try to shame Republicans in blindly rubber-stamping this bill by portraying them as hard-hearted towards the suffering of hurricane victims when in reality, Democrats leveraged the turmoil of suffering people to gamble on recovery funds.
And he has the audacity to call anyone else “big government?”
Christie ran to CNBC to complain about DeSantis and Florida Republicans ending Disney’s anti-capitalist favored status that was unfairly bestowed upon them and no other businesses. I’ve discussed it twice already:
One of the reasons why Disney is such an economic powerhouse is partly due to the special accommodations it received by previous lawmakers that allowed it to skirt restrictions other corporations were expected to follow under threat of penalty. The Reedy Creek Improvement District was established to oversee Disney yet Disney controlled the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
Here’s Jonathan Turley:
Technically, the board was elected by those living on the Disney property, which amounts to a small number of people living among the “cast members.”
It was a breathtaking deal for the company, which set its own building standards, granted its own construction permits and determined the scope of services, building codes, waste collection and other infrastructure matters.
Outside of the Vatican, such self-governance is little more than a fantasy for companies and organizations.
Criticizing the equal treatment of businesses and the rejection of wasteful spending are the leftist positions to take and it’s not surprising to see Christie with the left once again.
Christie is a tool
I always assume that every government relief package is as full of suet as Christie’s diet. But the Sandy bill was especially porky.