http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2...nistration_of_reckless_conduct_in_gwb_la.html Livery drivers who lost income by being stuck for four hours are starting a class-action. One of the beauty parts of this is that administration records will become discoverable. I thought about starting a thread about this incident (I hate to call it "Bridgegate" but that seems to be the shorthand of the day) a day or two ago. The more I thought about this, the more heinous it seemed to me. Am I crazy, or did members of that administration, maybe Christie himself, commit a criminal act on a grand scale? There are crimes that deal with curtailing someone's ability to move about freely. In Missouri, we have, of course, kidnapping, but we also have some lower level offenses such as felonious restraint and a misdemeanor simply called false imprisonment. New Jersey has some of the toughest kidnapping laws in the country as a result of the Lindbergh baby case. I have no idea about its lesser offenses. If I hold the door closed and don't let my wife or girlfriend out of the bedroom for four minutes, I'm guilty of at least false imprisonment. If I create a condition that keeps drivers stuck in place on a bridge for four hours, am I not guilty of at least that? It makes you wonder at a minimum about people who had to piss and shit on that bridge that day, and worse, about people with medical conditions like diabetes. Then there's the whole idea, irregardless of the criminality of it, that a political hack would make thousands of innocent people suffer just for some petty payback. Maybe I'm overthinking this one, but the more I think about it, the more pissed off I get.
Maybe I'm just too tired to understand what's going on, but...I have no idea what's going on! I'm assuming a bridge was shut down for four hours, since that's what the article said. But why was it shut down? What's the accusation? If they were doing road work or repairing damaged sections of the bridge then a lane closure kind of makes sense.
One or more people in Christie's administration ordered multiple lane closures of the George Washington Bridge between Manhattan and Jersey, ostensibly for a traffic flow study. Thousands of motorists were stuck for up to four hours. It later came to light that the closures were ordered as political payback to the Democratic mayor of Ft. Lee, on the Jersey side of the bridge, because he refused to endorse Christie in the 2012 gubernatorial election. Christie has made some not-too-sincere apologies and fired one of his top aids over the deal. There are some similarities to Watergate. First, both were done relevant to campaigns whose outcomes were never in any doubt. Second, like Nixon, Christie has been willing to throw his own people under the bus to try to keep the stink away. This tactic didn't work for Nixon. Whether Christie is personally responsible remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen whether another key similarity arises. Nixon was one of the shrewdest political operators in US history, maybe in the history of the world. It's very unlikely that he specifically ordered the actual burglary of the DNC HQ at the Watergate hotel because there was nothing to gain. What became clear later when the existence of the tapes emerged, and the Supreme Court's mandating of their release to prosecutors, was that Nixon was on tape specifically ordering Haldeman and Erlichman to spike the investigation, a major no-no and a serious federal crime. Nixon also approved the payment of hush money to some of those involved in the burglary, out of questionable campaign slush funds. So in areas of political intrigue, it's often not the crime that gits ya, it's the cover-up.
The problem is that none of it makes sense in the context of payback against the Democratic mayor. He's openly said he was never asked for an endorsement and Christie didn't need an endorsement, especially from a little town mayor of Ft Lee, given his overwhelming lead.
It's coming to light that perhaps.....just perhaps there were other instances of "hardball" being played by the same administration. http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d2...ffic Jams/id-c8d8f8f625304573aaaf6d3438967438 I never trusted that slob in the first place. Every word that spewed forth from him was total BS designed to tell the most people what they wanted to hear. IMHO: this just completely and irrevocably handed the presidency to Hillary (whom I distrust every bit as much, if not more). You all thought we were given a shit choice last election? Just wait we haven't seen nothing yet. This soap opera would be entertaining as all fuck if it weren't so infuriating.
