Power Walking With Chris Christie

Yesterday, I linked to a column that inspired a power walk.

When you go out for yours, I suggest listening to high-energy music (Jersey Boys!  Hamilton!  Workout Now! Cardio Motivator 2009!) or a good book.

City of Thieves, perhaps.  What a story.

Endurance.  A year in space, weightless.

Or Chris Christie’s Let Me Finish, read by the in-your-face former governor himself.  He, too, tells a great story.  The parts about his 15-year relationship with Trump especially so.

He spent months leading a team of 125 serious people putting together Trump’s transition plan.  It would have staffed a proper government.  Trump never even looked at it.

Much of what Christie has been willing to help Trump work toward, I’m against.  But if America was going to get an in-your-face overweight white guy, Christie would clearly have been a million times better than the one we got.

He repeatedly justifies his support of Trump by stating, simply, the alternative was Hillary.  As if that needs no elaboration.  But it does — and he never says why he found her objectionable.  Surely he didn’t buy the Benghazi nonsense, or the child sex rings.

In 2008, Trump wrote, “I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president.”  “Hillary is smart, tough and a very nice person. Bill Clinton was a great president. They are fine people. Hillary was roughed up by the media, and it was a tough campaign for her, but she’s a great trooper. Her history is far from being over.”

Christie obviously never quotes that — or helps us understand why he differs.

But he does cover the elephant in the room (and all the elephant jokes) . . . and I now believe he neither concocted nor approved Bridgegate.  Whether or not he was completely unaware of it for the four days it was going, as he claims to have been, is harder to know.  But if he wasn’t largely or entirely blameless, wouldn’t Bill Baroni, his Port Authority appointee, have said something to prosecutors to avoid or mitigate the two-year prison sentence he ultimately got?

(Long before and entirely unrelated to Bridgegate — but since we’re talking about power walks and elephant jokes — Bill wrote Fat Kid Got Fit: And So Can You!)

Putin is winning.  His sneak attack may ultimately prove to have done more to diminish America than the Japanese did with theirs.  It is ongoing, and almost half our country doesn’t even believe it happened or is happening.

We have handed the American Century to China.

Our allies are as hopeful as anyone else who “believes in” things like science, civility, and truth-telling that Trump will be gone soon.  But can the damage ever be fully repaired?

As good a read as Christie’s book is, when is he going to start saying these things?

Had he been chosen as Vice President, which by his account was all but in the bag, would he have been the enabler and apologist Pence is?