New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is embroiled in a political controversy over George Washington Bridge lane closures which morphed from a traffic nightmare into a major safety concern for Fort Lee, New Jersey... but what isn't being talked about?
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| A few thoughts on Bridgegate, Governor Christie's unfolding scandal, wherein one of his top aides... | |
| Ordered the closure of one of the most traveled bridges in North America on the opening day of school to create traffic jams as a retaliation for a local mayor not endorsing Governor Christie's re-election bid last fall. | |
| So there were four days of traffic jams that were ordered by one of his deputy chiefs of staff and This was eventually caught and reversed. | |
| They said there's a traffic study going on. | |
| They closed two of the three lanes coming out of Fort Hood to the George Washington Bridge. | |
| And, of course, Christie has denied. | |
| There's been some rumors about this. | |
| Christie has denied it repeatedly. | |
| They had anything to do with it. | |
| He says, I've asked my staff and so on. | |
| He's made jokes about it, like, oh, I couldn't come to the press conference. | |
| I was out there putting traffic cones on the bridge. | |
| And as it turns out, now that the emails have been released, it is pretty bad as far as that goes. | |
| So his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Ann Kelly, wrote to Port Authority executives in August of last year after the mayor didn't support Christie's re-election. | |
| And she said, time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee. | |
| And the executive replied, got it! | |
| And this resulted, of course, in multi-hour-long delays. | |
| One guy with a five-minute commute found it took him almost an hour to get to work. | |
| Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations, one involving an unconscious old woman who later died of cardiac arrest, trying to find a four-year-old kid, a car accident in which four people were injured, and so on. | |
| One of his staffers, somebody wrote, presently we have four very busy traffic lanes merging into only one toll booth. | |
| The bigger problem is getting kids to school. | |
| Help, please, it's maddening. | |
| And this was quoted, and one of Christie's aides said, is it wrong that I'm smiling? | |
| And the other one said, no. | |
| And the other one said, I feel badly about the kids, I guess. | |
| And the other one said, well, they're the children of Buono voters. | |
| That's Christie's gubernatorial candidate, Barbara Buono. | |
| So, you know, time for some traffic problems. | |
| Is it wrong that I'm smiling, that people and ambulances can't get across the bridge? | |
| Well, I mean, this is obviously pretty revolting and disgusting stuff. | |
| It's business as usual in politics. | |
| I mean, which was more important, a four-day traffic jam or Barack Obama's IRS-headed administration targeting conservative groups during an election year cycle and not giving them their tax-exempt status or putting it under endless review? | |
| Of course, Eric Holder's administration is supposed to be pursuing this IRS scandal from the last election cycle. | |
| And he's not even revealing to Congress how many resources he's applying to that scandal, let alone what's happening. | |
| So that's not happening. | |
| But within like approximately 12 nanoseconds of this going public, they are investigating to find out what was done. | |
| Now, it is actually illegal to use government resources for political gain. | |
| So this is sort of kind of illegal. | |
| And yet Governor Christie is referring to it. | |
| This was I'm shocked. | |
| He said, I'm shocked by the abject stupidity that was shown here. | |
| This was handled in a callous and indifferent way. | |
| Well, I can. | |
| This is what he's got to say. | |
| He can't say it's illegal, or he can't say it appears to be against the law, because that's pretty bad. | |
| What he does say is that... | |
| His deputy aide is fired. | |
| Why was she fired? | |
| Because, you see, she lied to him. | |
| She lied to him. | |
| So, in other words, people in politics who lie should be fired. | |
| How many times has Barack Obama lied about Obamacare, just to name one of many? | |
| Well, he's not going to get fired. | |
| Because, remember, the rules are only for the underlings. | |
| The further you go up in the political chain, the more glorious and liberated and insane things get. | |
| He's denying, of course, that he has any role in the attempt to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, which is the town at the foot of the bridge, for not endorsing Christie last year. | |
| This is no reflection on me. | |
| This is no reflection on this office. | |
| Of course it is. | |
| I mean, a man is known by the company he keeps. | |
| If he had these people around him, then they did all of this apparently. | |
| They lied to his face about it. | |
| He's been working with them for years. | |
| So does he have absolutely no idea that they have no ethics? | |
| Well, if so, then he's completely incompetent as a manager. | |
| I mean, it doesn't matter whether he knows or not. | |
| He's completely incompetent as a manager if he surrounds himself with people who do stupid, potentially illegal stuff and lie to his face about it when asked. | |
| Well, or are they doing things that he would expressly disapprove of? | |
| Well, then he's also a bad manager because he's hiring people and working with people and giving people authority who are doing the exact opposite of what he wants, and he has no knowledge of it. | |
| That just makes him... | |
| I mean, if you can't even run a bridge, how on earth could you run for president? | |
| It's completely ridiculous. | |
| So, again, people are going to get, does he know or not? | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| Fundamentally, it doesn't know. | |
| The man is either immoral or incompetent. | |
| It doesn't really matter which one it is as far as holding office goes. | |
| But, you know, the other thing that I'll mention, I mean, jobs report just came out, 93 million Americans are not in the workforce, and a little over 70,000 jobs were created in December, far short of the 150,000 that is just needed to maintain the low employment rate. | |
| I did a video a few years ago you might want to check out. | |
| It's one of my most popular videos called, There Will Be No Economic Recovery, Prepare Yourself Accordingly. | |
| What this means is that for every person who got a job in December in the United States, five people left the workforce. | |
| Five people left the workforce permanently. | |
| This is absolutely catastrophic. | |
| They're barred from the workplace by a wide variety of laws, licensing, regulations, taxes, just the general accumulation of lower intestine regurgitated red tape that slowly does strangle off the lifeblood of any economy. | |
| And this is a little bit more important than a four-day traffic jam, but of course it's going to get somewhat eclipsed, particularly in the left-wing media about this. | |
| And I guess the last perspective that I'll mention, I don't have a huge amount to say about all this, but the last thing I'll mention is, for a moment, if you don't mind, cast your mind like a fly-fishing lure across the ocean, deep into the desert, into a little place called Iraq. | |
| The American people are up in arms, seize the Iraqi, I guess the last Iraqi who has access to the internet through an ASCII browser. | |
| The Americans are really up in arms because of a traffic jam that occurred for a couple of days, and they're looking at investigating their leaders for wrongdoing, for lies, for misleading the public. | |
| For a traffic jam, there are around you as an Iraqi About a million people dead. | |
| There is a 600% increase in leukemia as a result of the various chemical and radioactive weapons that were used, fairly unnecessarily, against the virtually non-existent Iraqi army. | |
| The genetic integrity of the entire city of Fallujah has been so viciously compromised that birth defects are depressingly common. | |
| The infrastructure has been smashed, and you can find out more about this in my video, Iraq, A Decade of Hell. | |
| And you look at the people of America who cheered the rockets that rained down on you, and you realize that they have finally found their moral cause. | |
| It is not in bringing the war criminals who made this war happen to justice. | |
| It is not in impeaching or prosecuting the people who made all of these million deaths and millions more refugees happen. | |
| It is over a traffic jam. | |
| That America seems to have found its moral fiber. | |
| Just imagine, looking at the lush crescent of America from the blood-soaked desert of Iraq. |