What Liberals REALLY Think: Media Matters’ Chris Christie Freakout 2010

This is just good stuff from Big Journalism....

Media Matters’ Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert is apoplectic because Chris Christie went on vacation to Disney World when a blizzard hit New Jersey.
I am almost positive that Boehlert’s job description in the Senior Fellows sacred Buffalo Bob skin-bound job manual reads: Obsess over conservative dudes. It’s been his entire focus for the past several days, giving Andrew Breitbart a reprieve. It’s a good thing that Media Matters doesn’t pride itself on consistency, because some may be wondering where this lefty tenacity was when Kathleen Blanco hemmed and hawed during Hurricane Katrina when she should have been calling out the National Guard, something for which Bush was blamed.
No, “NJ” didn’t call out the National Guard. Chris Christie called out the National Guard because that’s the job of the governor. Of course, I don’t expect a “senior fellow” who so zealously attempts debate on the matter to actually know what he’s talking about if he comes from Media Matters. Soros pays him to be persistent, not knowledgeable, folks.
Media Matters of course loyally defended Blanco even though Blanco and Nagin’s (and Brown’s) ineffectiveness made this national disaster a catastrophe. I would say “and now MMFA assails Christie for that which they defended Blanco,” except doing so compares Chris Christie’s performance and Blanco’s performance which is illogical because they are not equal. Christie is employing all his state’s resources and didn’t have to be prodded by the President (curiously, MMFA doesn’t assail Obama for being out of town when the massive blizzard hit) to call out the National Guard.
Says Christie spokesman:
“Yes, this was a big snow, but we are a northeastern state, and we get plenty of snow, including heavy hits like this,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Hill. “But the sky really is not falling, and we’ll get through this just as we always have, notwithstanding complaints from opportunistic partisans like Lesniak.”
Christie appears to be doing as much as he can with state resources, but it doesn’t help when communities are waiting for the disbursement of federal emergency funds. New Jersey’s finances have been mismanaged for years with Christie walking into an $11 billion dollar budget deficit.
After slashing the budget and making ends meet the man, like anyone, is entitled to a vacation just as President Obama is entitled to a vacation … another one. For which we all pay. MMFA’s criticism of Christie rests upon the presupposition that Christie isn’t doing anything, which is why their hollow criticism is so comedically false.
Interestingly, they say nothing of Michael Bloomberg’s response. Bloomberg’s response is actually less about response post-blizzard and more about what he did leading up to the storm:
Overnight, it seems, the avenues of Manhattan, already choked with motor vehicular traffic, are losing a lane to accommodate new curbside bike lanes. Under the new plan, cars and trucks that elect to park now do so in an essential limbo – in “non-spaces” between the bike lane and the leftmost lane of traffic.
Work on the project, which began in June, has now been completed on First Avenue on the East Side and Columbus on the West but is ongoing. Eventually both sides will meet in the middle, hampering the flow of traffic on all the major arteries.
Yes, I’m sure the narrow streets due to the bike paths are much easier through which emergency vehicles to travel.
The remarks on Twitter have been comical, “Bloomberg takes salt from your food but not the snow from your sidewalk,” and this from Scott Ott:
I realize that there is only so much officials can do when hit with 20 inches of snow in such a short period of time and while I know how frustrating it can be (hey – in St. Louis city the side streets aren’t plowed AT ALL, EVER, folks, so we win Blizzard!), Bloomberg seems to be receiving a lot more flack that MMFA is, of course, ignoring.
But Soros isn’t paying MMFA to go after Democrats.