New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is reportedly set to announce on Wednesday that he’s dropping out of the presidential race, returning to a home state that can’t stand him and re-embracing a Bruce Springsteen who still doesn’t want to be his friend.
That’s great news for America, but bad news for anyone hoping to vote for a real, true dick.
Christie, you see, has been a dick since Ben Carson was still at home, quietly waxing his family portrait of himself and Jesus Christ. Christie has been a dick on the public stage since Carly Fiorina was still in the private sector, demurely firing thousands of people. Christie is an old-school and unreconstructed dick. Recall, if you will:
• He crossed millions of dollars intended to fund family planning out of the state budget each and every year, making it harder for poor women to access pap smears, cancer screenings, and other lifesaving forms of preventative healthcare. This time last year, he was onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, bragging about it.
Later that year, the governor was pressing hard on Alan Rosenthal, the Rutgers political scientist whom Republicans and Democrats had chosen as the tiebreaking member of the commission that was redistricting the state’s legislative districts. Mr. Christie wanted Mr. Rosenthal to vote for the map put forward by the Republicans on the commission, but instead he chose the Democrats’ plan, saying it offered more stability.
Soon after, Mr. Christie used his line-item veto to cut $169,000 for two programs at Mr. Rosenthal’s institute at Rutgers.
That’s right: the governor personally went out of his way to mess up the academic programs of a professor for not picking the map he liked.
• There’s a whole YouTube channel of him shouting at people he doesn’t like, updated by the governor’s own staff. They stopped updating it about two years ago, when it became politically expedient for him to look like less of a dick, but there’s no question they were incredibly proud of it for a very long time:
• He wants to keep trans children out of the “wrong” bathroom because “life is confusing enough for our children,” what with terrorism and all. Huh? Never mind, we don’t care enough to try to parse that one again.
• Despite his efforts to present himself as a regular Jersey guy, he merrily took lots of money, free trips, and special favors from people like Sheldon Adelson and King Abdullah of Jordan, which, we will grant you, is less a dick move than just straight, uncut greed.
