Wednesday, June 1, 2011

"Coptergate" eclipses "Iowagate"

Or, "Drumthwacketgate", if you're into tongue twisters.

By now we all know that Governor Christie used a state helicopter to watch his son's baseball game at St Joe's in Montvale yesterday, and the Liberal Media was all over it.

Am I alone in being less than apoplectic about this? I am no expert in the do's and don'ts of the use of state vehicles by the governor, so I can't say if this was an improper use of the state helicopter, although it certainly seems so. And for all I know there may have been some important state business he needed to get to or from before or after the game.

In the list of outrages committed by this governor this incident ranks somewhere towards the bottom. Bad optics? Absolutely. But hey, he was going to watch his kid play ball, so at least he walks the walk rides the SUV when it comes to family values.

Far more offensive (to me at least), and I'm no lawyer but possibly illegal, is his using the taxpayer owned governor's mansion, Drumthwacket, to host a cadre of GOP bigwig donors form Iowa to beg him to run for president. This story was buried deep below the fold yesterday; I needed to hit "next" several times on nj.com to find any reference to it. As of Tuesday morning  there was only a passing reference to it.

If outrage is a limited resource, we should care more about Iowagate and less about Coptergate.

This is neither the first time nor the last time Christie  has misused NJ taxpayer dollars (e.g. "town hall" meetings, YouTube videos). Does anyone care that he hosted GOP donors from Iowa at the taxpayer-owned governor's mansion?

I would like to know what he was anticipating was going to happen at that meeting to cause him to pull a stunt like Coptergate to create such a diversion and deflect attention from the Iowa meeting, which was a more egregious misuse of taxpayer funds. If creating a diversion was his intention, it worked.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent editorial!

Unknown said...

Thank you, "Anonymous", whoever you are :)

Deciminyan said...

According to one of the parents of a kid on the baseball team, there's a gentle hill that needs to be climbed to get to the field. So the team provides golf carts and drivers for "grandparents" and the infirm to get up the hill. They prepared their best golf cart for Christie, cleaned it up, and it was available to transport him up the hill. But apparently a golf cart is not good enough for His Arrogance. He opted to have a taxpayer-funded limo drive him the 100 yards to the ball field.